To Susan and Jim, Our core business is building sites with Drupal. We focus on XHTML 1.0 strict compliance and are striving towards full adherence of the New Zealand e-government web guidelines which cover accessibility, and various other considerations. We've found Drupal to be remarkably pliable with regard to those changes.
Susan, the approach of altering modules that you described will definitely cause you maintenance headaches. I would encourage you to learn as much as possible about Drupal's very sophisticated system of both theme and functionality overrides (called "hooks" in the Drupal world). By judicious use of theme and module overrides and by building sites in "multi-site" mode, you can achieve any sort of markup and form alterations while simultaneously completely avoiding changes to Drupal core code or 3rd party modules you might employ. That makes future updates of core and modules much much less painful. Drupal also makes it easy to replace any interface text, either with Drupal's full-blown internationalisation framework, or by using the string replacement functionality introduced with Drupal 6.x (see your settings.php file). We (Egressive) actually chose Drupal as our core platform because of it's community's surprisingly high awareness of web standards, and because of the degree to which Drupal - by design - allows us to tweak markup and user interface elements to comply with our preferred standards. It's an incredibly powerful, versatile system. Hope that helps you. Kind regards, Dave James O'Neill wrote: > Susan, > > That give me an idea. I am just starting to learn PHP and Drupal so > making changes on my own will be fun. I am looking forward to tacking some. > > Thanks, > > Jim > > > > > I am currently working on a large Drupal project using lots of > modules. I have created my own Theme that is 508 compliant (and > semantic) that I use to start with - headers, footers, content area > titles, main site navigation that is based off the Garland theme. > No problem there. > > Each module though that I work with I asses the code and then make > modifications to the base files if necessary to be compliant, and > most times it is necessary, though sometimes its only a couple of > little things. It's not hard to do, but later upgrades are going > to be a b--- so I document every change hopefully to make it easier > later on. > > It also depends on what "Ajax" functionality you choose to use, or > not use. The more you use, the less compliant it becomes. > > This is all so simplistic, don't know if any of it will help you. > > -- > Susan R. Grossman > [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > ******************************************************************* > List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm > Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ******************************************************************* -- Dave Lane = Egressive Ltd = [EMAIL PROTECTED] = m: +64 21 229 8147 p: +64 3 9633733 = Linux: it just tastes better = nosoftwarepatents http://egressive.com ==== we only use open standards: http://w3.org Effusion Group Founding Member =========== http://effusiongroup.com ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
