Was I ever glad I tried IRC. It is good to get in the habit of watching what folks are doing/talking about out there, and a very nice user (EclipseGC) took me through a personal walkthrough of how to use phptemplate to theme Drupal. It’s not nearly as complicated as I thought it was (I’m beginning to think I have a mental block against Drupal, lol). It was a great mini-tutorial and it was just what I needed for the light to “go on” and get me started theming for real. You too can IRC with drupalers on freenode in the channels #drupal-support and #drupal-dojo.

I’ve also been searching for an e-commerce solution for a potential customer who has a simple site in desperate need of a redesign. Of course, the first thing I thought of was using Drupal with a very promising cart module called Ubercart. After I crashed and burned trying to set up the pre-school site, though, I thought no way would it work; I needed a lot more experience before I tackled an e-commerce project with Drupal. I started to look for a cart solution that would allow me to plug “buy it now” buttons onto an existing site and provide a cart backend. I thought it would be a fairly simple thing to track down and I started to search for options. Easy, ha! Everything I found had a serious down-side, like monthly rental and hosting charges (RomanCart), or it required a desktop application to work (Cartit), or lacked enough payment gateways (NOP). The only other solution I found that was a definite “maybe” was Cartweaver, a PHP cart/extension for Dreamweaver. But 1) it costs $250 and 2) I’m not all that fond of Dreamweaver. It’s OK, but I don’t really want to invest, monetarily or time-wise, in aquiring and learning a system that isn’t something I know I will use. Sigh.

The funny thing is, after that mini-tut in Drupal theming, and after coming across a series of instructions on creating a brochure site in Drupal, I have come to the realization that I am going to have to bite the bullet and, if you haven’t guessed by now, do it Drupal after all. Whew. Can I sit down now? I’m dizzy.