it's wednesday afternoon & the heat is pretty oppressive - i've put a little rack under my laptop because she's so hot, & my hands are too sweaty to use the trackpad. it's not just madrid's weather that is making me sweat - we've all been working hard on the new /etc site since our late start this morning (we had a late night, ok?). agnes is busy developing the theme for the site, aileen is working on profiles & user roles, donna & amaia are configuring the mailing list integration & i have been using the command line to drush download modules - much easier & quicker than the process of downloading, unpacking, ftp-ing & installing! & very exciting for me to use the command line, which i generally only get to do when hanging out with the /etc crowd.

we are in that murky middle phase of the process, where we have done a lot of groundwork in terms of defining users, content types, general structure & functionality required, but everything is still very bitsy & amorphous. yesterday amaia installed the test site which was really interesting to watch - again much simplified by using drush.

working with drupal can be pretty frustrating; it seems that, every step of the way, another module is required to do what we want - & then that module requires other modules, & then every little thing has to be finely configured to work just right with every other piece of the puzzle. from my previous experience with the magdalena aotearoa site, i know we are doing a lot better this time in terms of defining what we need first, but some things we just can't define until we know what's possible, which we don't really know for sure until we actually try it. we *think* we're going to be able to do everything we want, but getting there isn't simple. also the naming of different components and modules is sometimes ambiguous or confusing, the documentation ranges from really clear & detailed to non-existent, & some things just don't seem intuitive.

but, with our 5 brains & our different complementary experiences & skills, i'm still confident that we will have a new site by the end of friday; maybe not a completely finished one, but a web site is never finished, is it?