Well, I'm back to work on this site again after having to take a breather for work. Work is still incredibly busy, but squeezing this in.

Just got back from an INCREDIBLE upstate retreat with Khenpo Tenzin Norgey on Yumkha. The weather was just amazing and the teachings were so clear like the sky!

We were also really fortunate to be able to receive interviews and blessings from His Holiness Penor Rinpoche as well as Khentul Gyangkhang Rinpoche, both of whom happened to be at the center during this short retreat.

On to the "case!"

Well, folks, looks like our experiment in upgrading to Drupal 6 failed. I am pretty sure this is because of these reasons:

1) Modules. I tried to disable as many modules as possible, but somehow couldn't get them all.
2) Database back-up attempts not working. I tried to change the name of the database so I could upgrade with impunity, but that didn't work.

At one point I had Drupal 6 working, but the tables for the content were mashed. We had images appearing where content was.

Just so everyone knows, we have not settled on a look and feel for this "Retreats" site.

The design you see now is part of the system we are using to generate these pages and is highly adaptable.

If you are interested in seeing some of the designs we are playing with, be sure to sign up for the site and shoot a note to the Webmaster so that you can be enabled to "change themes." What this would do is enable you to apply other templates we've been designing to the site and see how those work.

http://drupal.org/node/133977

We have plans to localize this site. "Localization" means that we can make a site that works in different languages, such as Mandarin or Spanish.

This has a lot of possibilities!

If you can help with coding PHP, moving mySQL databases, etc., please contact us.

Right now we're just getting content on the pages and correcting the content itself.

Next steps will be to:
1) Add photos
2) Add translation in Tibetan and Chinese, at least on a basic level
3) Upgrade the look and feel. One easy change may be to change the light pink background to a pattern, creating boxes to keep the navigation legible. We should also take a lok at ways to make the headers on the Nav items and boxes the most pleasing font.

Please feel free to comment here with any ideas!