Welcome Planet readers!

Some people have asked why my site isn't on Planet Drupal. Well, I'm not much of a blogger and my articles come out so sporadically I didn't think it was worth asking to be included. But then greggles went and filed an issue on it so I decided to clean this place up a bit and put out the welcome sign.

For those who don't know me, my name is Michelle Cox. I've been using Drupal since April of 2005. I'd been using Gallery 2 for about a month and was hanging out in #gallery. The devs there were talking about these "CMS" thingies for building websites. I thought it might be nice to use that on the website I was building with Gallery 2 instead of my home brewed PHP concoction. Wordpress and Drupal were the two suggested. At the time, the WP integration wasn't very good and walkah suggested I wander over to #drupal, which was also on freenode and ask about integrating it with G2. Here's how that went:

Session Start: Tue Apr 19 21:13:07 2005
Session Ident: #drupal
[21:13] * Now talking in #drupal
[21:13] * Topic is 'Drupal Development Chat | Use #drupal-support or http://drupal.org/forum for support questions.'
[21:13] * Set by UnConeD on Sat Nov 20 07:01:40
[21:13] * MichelleC looks at the topic. I don't think this is where I wanna be, walkah :)
[21:13] * MichelleC goes to support
[21:13] < walkah > [Line removed because I didn't get permission to post this]
Session Close: Tue Apr 19 21:13:51 2005

See, it's important to read topics. :)

Ok, so the folks in support helped me out and I decided to give Drupal a shot. 4.6 had just come out at that time, so I grabbed that and dove in. The result of that (currently in 4.7) is the La Crosse Area Camera Club site. That's actually the only site I still have using Gallery 2. As much as I love G2, I think for most sites it is over-kill and tend to use native Drupal solutions.

Now over 2.5 years have passed since that chat that changed my life. I've gotten heavily into Drupal and it now consumes nearly all my computer time. At first, it was just putting together existing modules and theming but now I've branched out into actually writing modules. That surprised some people but I actually do have a programming background. I wrote my first BASIC program on my Commodore 64 circa 1984 so I'm no stranger to coding. I've got a BS degree in computer science and programmed professionally in Visual FoxPro for 6 years before staying home to parent. I just don't know PHP very well despite using it for my cobbled together pre-Drupal sites and know the Drupal API even less. But I'm learning quick and I must say Drupal is a delight to program in now that I'm starting to "get it".

Ok, enough about me. What is this place? Well, "Shell Multimedia" is a play on my name (For the record, though, Shell is not my nickname). I picked it some time ago when I was thinking of starting a work from home company and hadn't decided if I wanted to do web work or photography or videography. "Multimedia" covered it all and the domain name was available. I've decided photos and video are better as hobbies for me and focused on web development but I never did start a company. For now I just do a bit of freelance work under my own name.

On this site, you'll find articles and tutorials and general writings of things I'm figuring out as I go along. Most of it comes out of work on my never finished Coulee Region community portal. A lot of it has several versions as I learn better ways of doing things and re-write. User Profiles, which is what I'm probably most known for, is currently undergoing a major revision and being turned into the Advanced Profile module (will blog about that more later). I'm also starting to write up smaller things that I learn in addition to my huge tutorials. So come on in and look around. I'm not a terribly prolific writer so there isn't a ton of content, but there's some good stuff here, I think.

If you have any comments, I'd love to hear from you. You don't need an account to post but you can log in with your drupal.org ID or create an account if you want. Just jump in and post.

Welcome!