I've just launched the new website for St John's College JCR at http://johnsjcr.org.uk/. It's based on Drupal 4.7.3 with a lot of extra modules added, but mainly based on the Organic Groups module. This helps to organise all of our little subcommunities and groups. I also hacked together a custom module called groupforums, which displays listings of one of the OG node types as conventional forums, in order to help people get used to the site.
Finally, someone found a clean way to do three-column fluid layout with XHTML and CSS. This solves just about every three-column layout problem I've ever had. It fixes the visual elements, keeping the footer at the bottom of the page no matter which column is the tallest, and resizing without the elements running into each other.
The visual side of this has been done before – especially with tables! – but what is most important about this version is that is using clean XHTML, with no extra non-semantic markup needed, though one div tag can be added for increased browser compatibility. What's more, it allows a good struture: when it's unstyled, it displays the heading and content before the navigation. This makes things easier for people with screen readers and older browsers.
I've been thinking about how the ASP.NET Visual Designer should work with CSS and good semantic markup, and I've been thinking a lot about the role of both of these in the Web. In particular, what part do they play with ASP.NET?
There were still a few PostgreSQL bugs in Drupal that I had to fix before getting on with theming the site. This turned out to be too big a task for an evening so I modified the Drupal port of Michael Heilemann's Kubrick theme, changing the title picture (anyone recogise the mountain?) and the footer, hacking the template so that the sidebar vanishes if it has no content, and making a few other tweaks. Personally I still have my reservations about a fixed-width layout like this - even though it's very pretty - so when I have time I'll fix it up to use relative units.
