We have just launched the Beta release of Sparkle*Shelf (http://sparkleshelf.com), a site that provides beauty enthusiasts with the latest information and tutorials on fashion, hair and makeup. We currently host fifteen regular feature writers, who contribute a total of 3-5 articles a day.

Sparkle*Shelf is also a place for members to connect with other like-minded members. There are basic social networking features as well as a number of beauty related applications/games, such as polls, quizzes and "smack-downs".

Design

We spent a good amount of effort developing the Sparkle*Shelf theme. It took a while to get our brains wrapped around Drupal, but we are now total converts. We use Panels 2 and Views quite a bit, and take full advantage of the file templating features in core. Many many hours have been spent tweaking the layout - we've been able to do some amazing things with CSS alone.

Content Types and Applications

The site supports the following content types:

• Feature Content - these are the primary beauty related articles. Each article is assigned to one of the three categories of the site - Makeup Studio, Hair Salon and Wardrobe. Content shows up in categorized lists on the frontpage and as a teaser on the appropriate landing pages for each of the categories.
• Beauty Dilemma - this is an advanced poll with an image field. Users ask the community for advice about decisions they are making.
• Beauty Polls - simple beauty related polls
• SparkleIQ (Quizzes) - Quizzes Use the Quiz module to create personality-style quizzes.
• Celebrity Smackdown - We use the Smack-down module to create a fun Celeb vs. Celeb game
• What's in your bag? - members can upload a picture of what's in their purses/bags.

Roles

The site has four roles - Admins, Feature Writers, Authenticated Users and Anonymous Users. Registered users can create What's in Your Bag and Beauty Dilemma nodes. Feature writers can also post articles (we use Workflow-ng to manage workflow). Admins create the remaining content types.

Social Networking

We're using Advprofile along with Buddylist and Nodeprofile to create "Beauty Profiles." We've integrated "What's In Your Bag" and "Beauty Dilemma" content types as well - if a user has created either of these content types, the latest items will show up in her (or his) profile.

Feature Writers have their own promotional pages - we thought it would be nice for them to be able to point to a personalized homepages with all of their content. See here for an example.

General Comments

We started working on this project, we were intimidated by Drupal. However, we've been extremely impressed (and thankful) with the amount of active support available in the community. Whenever we came across a problem that stumped us, we were eventually able to find a solution. So thanks to all of the active contributors!

-Marie

Drupal version: Drupal 5.x