Unbelievably, my first Drupal website is nearing completion and approaching launch.

“Nearing completion” rightfully belongs couched in quotes as I’ve been daily uttering “today is the day I finish the website” — for the past 3 weeks!

I’ve been burning the midnight oil every day and night, but the goal-post keeps moving as I realize how many of those non-glamorous but essential tasks remain to be done.

The site is looking and working great in a general way and I’m really pleased with how far I’ve come in my understanding of Drupal, PHP, jquery and CSS. It’s really not a very large or complex website, but I’m proud that I architected it in a way that is highly scalable and truly dynamic. My highest priority was to deliver a site that is pleasant and easy for my client to update himself. I think I’ve done that.

But there is still so much to do! Here’s what I’m sure is just a partial list…

• Create responsive styles for mobile devices
• Add donate button and functionality (client wants it on bottom nav and as “ad” on a few pages)
• Create user role for customers
• Give users a way to unsubscribe to newsletters (otherwise: “you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave!”)
• Create admin dashboard/landing page for client with limited editing capabilities, but no ability to really mess things up!
• Implement quantity based discounts and add product bundles to store
• Configure shipping options and rates
• Optimize database
• Style error and maintenance pages
• Upgrade core and modules so everything is clean and duckiny
• Map existing http://www.gench.com site and create redirects for any abandoned links
• Test shopping-cart-to-paypal end-to-end
• Setup google analytics optimize for search robots
• Enable Mollum and register site with mollom.com
• Train client on updating content and store inventory
• Backup exisiting gench site
• Promote new gench site to production!
• Start next Drupal site! I’ll be overhauling http://www.thomasdimuzio.com – can’t wait!

The site can currently be viewed at http://www.gench.com/new/drupal, but I am only updating it each evening with the day’s work (which I complete on my local server/site).