Rake and Radish Farm is a new farm being started by our younger child, Ardeo. Ardeo had to put up with a lot in their teenage years having parents who worked together from home. We used to get fined a twoonie (that $2 to non-Canadians) if we talked shop over dinner.
But now, at the age of 23 and long since moved out from the family home, Ardeo was keen to take up the parental offer of a website.
Since starting a farm is a monumental task, we needed to make sure that the website was easy to get set up and easy to maintain for them going forward.
A weekend home to visit (pre-pandemic) allowed us to co-work having set up a basic Drutopia install. As Ardeo started writing copy and posting to the new site, we continued to flesh out some extras they’d need. We added the Webform module so that we could develop an online signup for for Ardeo’s CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) veggie box.
We also tweaked the person content type to add a pronoun field as Ardeo is nonbinary and uses they. Both this change and webform will hopefully soon make it into Drutopia.
Then the largest task was to develop a new skin for the Octavia theme, which is the standard theme for Drutopia. Skins is a flexible tool we have to provide a different look to a site but without changing the base theme being used. This makes it easier and also ensures that a skin will inherit any improvements made to the theme.
We also used this time to make a number of changes to the base Octavia theme so it would work better in mobile, a real need for the demographic Ardeo was looking to as customers.
Once Ardeo had a logo and chose some fonts we put together a skin that worked with the logo’s colours and let Ardeo have a real role in putting their stamp on the site.
We are all happy with the result. Given that food security is more important now than ever during the pandemic, we’re pleased to have been able to launch this quickly while Ardeo digs into the work of fence building, getting a water system in place, and digging beds. Since we can’t be there to lend a hand with the digging, helping with the website is at least something we can do. The best reward? A first veggie box customer within hours of the site going live.