It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!

Our new website is live. Yes, my boss picked April Fool's Day to launch it. It is coincidentally the start of our organization's fiscal year, and I have no idea what that says about us. Mostly the date was picked because we had to stop some time. The project had taken longer than expected and had grown considerably beyond our earlier expectations. It's been a madhouse... and I'm glad it's over. If I never work another day of overtime in my life, it will be too soon.

This monster of a site has finally come to life. It's no surprise that I described this website as Frankenstein. My boss was Dr Frankenstein (Communications lead), for conceiving it and making it happen. I was Igor (developer), for being the, um, grunt worker who put it together. A coworker was The Bride of Frankenstein (Communications Team, for making sure he took care of his personal grooming and agrathea was the lightning (designer, themer and magician), for bringing the whole mess to life and giving it some personality.

We used Drupal to build it and it has to be said that Drupal is one incredible CMS. The power of Drupal is simply astonishing. Without it we'd have taken four times longer to do this and it would not have been anything near as good as it is. And by now we would have hated the site. Don't get me wrong; after months of overtime and stress, I'm exhausted and don't want to see Drupal again for a while, but I still love it. I'll be blogging about many of the technical specifications, but I'll post those entries to that site. Our organization serves and partners with nonprofits and we want to help them creating their own sites by providing a roadmap to what we did, with tutorials, notes, recipes and more.

It's not perfect and if I knew what I know now back when I started it, I might have used some different approaches, but overall I think this is a really good website and I'm very proud of it. It was a great team effort.

In any event, please check it out and let me know what you think:
http://www.mmt.org/

Or jump to some of the highlights:
The Staff Page... with a cool then-and-now high school yearbook theme. While you're there, click on my profile. And yes, my before image does look like a convict.
Our Gallery... and while you're there click on a couple of images and on the video image in the sidebar. Special effects!
Our Awards Database... Cool looking search with a cool filter section.
The Apply Page... one of our splash pages.
Our Help Desk... a splash page of help for those seeking our assistance.
Our Forums... Our cool-looking forums.
Our Blogs... An at-a-glance splash page for our blogs.
Our Calendar... When we do what.