the-racehorse.com web site has three main content sections: racing, betting and breeding. It is updated daily by Harbury Media with articles, news and photographs. Visitors can subscribe to various e-bulletins.

The site is free to use and includes advertising banners along the top and right-hand side of pages. Navigation is along the top and left-hand side.

the-racehorse.com was built with Drupal, an open-source CMS and is based on PHP with an SQL database.

Paola adapted the existing homepage module for a bespoke grid layout for the site.

The main content area on the home pages is a two-column grid containing nine feature article teasers: one leader with a medium-sized photo, four features with thumbnail photos and four features without photos.

The home page contains articles from the racing, betting and breeding sections of the site. The article titles are colour-coded according to the section they're from and there is an extra taxonomy link to the section (e.g., Racing | Interviews). The sub home pages only contain features from one of racing, betting or breeding but otherwise have the same grid layout.

Paola wrote a new module to generate and maintain the home page type.

This was before Drupal introduced the notion of content types where fields could be added. Paola made use of the 'Promoted to front page" node attribute to mark which pages could be included on a home page ('nodes' include static pages, articles and bulletins.)

The maintenance form is arranged in the same grid format as the home page.

Maintainers pick the article to display at each location from a pull-down list. The pull-down list is generated from a database query of all nodes marked with "Promoted to front page", most recent nodes first.

Paola extended the taxonomy module to integrate a node's taxonomy links to the main navigation menu: when a taxonomy term is clicked at the end of an article, the side menu is displayed expanded as if that term had been picked from the menu.

She created a taxonomy to implement the site structure. All articles are posted against a term in this taxonomy. The taxonomy was used to generate the site map (using the site map module) and the main navigation menu (using the taxonomy menu module). Drupal also displays taxonomy links at the end of articles and summaries.

When a taxonomy term is clicked (e.g., "Carnaby's View"), Drupal filters content by that term. A visitor can also select the term from the menu to achieve the same result (Racing > Carnaby's View).

However, Drupal's normal behaviour is that when a visitor clicks on a taxonomy term at the end of an article, the menu is displayed collapsed. We wanted the menu to show the term link selected.

The page racing/carnabys_view is associated with the taxonomy menu URL taxonomy_menu/1/2/15 and the taxonomy term URL taxonomy/term/15. We want both of these to be aliased to racing/carnabys_view but Drupal only allows one alias per target URL.

Using the pathauto module, Paola set up a rule so that taxonomy terms would generate aliases in the form of tag/[catpath] (e.g., tag/racing/carnabys_view). She then extended the taxonomy module to rewrite the destination term links by stripping off the tag/ prefix.

Clicking on a taxonomy term after an article or summary now expands the main menu as if that menu item had been selected.

The Drupal simplenews module allows the creation of newsletters.

By default, the module displays one subscription block in the sidebar for every newsletter.

Paola extended the module to list all available newsletters in one block so that visitors can subscribe to more than one newsletter in one action.