Since I posted my new Resume, a few folks have asked how or why I've implemented certain features. I've decided to go ahead and write a series of articles explaining how I went ahead and built it. Over these articles, we're going to go from the idea "I should put my resume on the web" to launching the site. Since I've done no custom coding on this site, I hope it will be approachable to new Site Builders. Although we're using my Resume as a example, my goal isn't necessarily to teach you how to build a resume site. I'm more interested in teaching how to think about building sites in general.

Some of the topics we'll cover are:

• Wire Framing
• Building Content Types, Fields UI, Taxonomy
• Views, Nodequeue
• Using Context to Layout the Page
• Contact Form
• Selecting a Theme to use as a base, and using a Sub-Theme to make it your own
• JS Touches like Views Accordion and Colorbox
• Seo with Meta Tags, Page Titles and Google Analytics
• Performance with caching, memcache and boost

In this post I think I should answer the first question: Why build a Resume in a CMS, and why Drupal?

That is a good question. It's funny, I've always told folks that no matter the size of the site, they should consider using a CMS. Although there's more setup time, once the site is build updating and expanding the site is much easier. You're just adding content and not worrying about formatting and such. Like the proverbial cobbler, I had no shoes. I never did this for myself, because adding a new project was hand editing HTML and adding some Javascript, I didn't do it as ofter as I should. So I decided that it was time to use a CMS.

Why Drupal? I suspect that there's 3 answers to that. First off I do believe that Drupal is the best tool on the market for creating websites. Second, I make my living working with it, so it would seem odd to create a site in Joomla or Wordpress. Thirdly, there is an expression, when you have a hammer all problems look like nails. I'm not sure that's entirely, true but as I'm in and out of Drupal all day it felt like a natural idea.

A third question might be "Why not just put the content of the Resume into a text field"? There is some additional functionality that I want to take advantage of in the future which we will discuss in future articles.

Tune in soon for my post on wireframing.