In 2013, I accepted a freelance gig from a former co-worker to help rework her church's website. She provided the design and the basic site architecture while another church member provided the majority of the written content. (How often do you get a writer/editor in a freelance project?) No part of the former site was to be migrated. So, for me, this was my first project that I started from scratch using Drupal 7.

One requirement was that the site needed to be responsive and while I had implemented off-the-shelf responsive themes on other projects, I had never created a custom responsive theme. I chose Omega as the basis for the sub theme after years of using Zen. I recall that I spent a good week doing the research and I believe that in the end I chose it because it seemed to handle the responsive layout easiest. And, technically speaking, the theme is really an adaptive one, and not responsive.

Other highlights:

I coded a small module to parse an RSS feed from another website. Unfortunately, the content from this particular feed is occasionally not well-formed and sometimes the connection with the feed itself is poor, so I needed to provide some sort of "back door" where the module could display some default text rather throw up an error message.

I also thought about using Panels at the beginning but decided against it because it seemed unnecessary. the scope of the initial project changed enough times and by the end, I regretted that initial decision. The initial setup time would have been much more efficient than the extensive site management of Blocks that was done instead.

I put a bit of research into creating a project that would automatically indicate the current date within the church's liturgical calendar (that is, the textual representation -- "Third Sunday of Lent"). However, it required more effort than I had time for and, in restropect, might be better suited as a plug-in calendar for the Date/Calendar modules.

I learned a great deal about theming and CSS and I even got a greater understanding of Christian theology. I'm still amazed that there's over 50 English translations to the Bible. I''m still a bit uncertain about the difference between Lutherans and Catholics but I like that they refer to the day before Good Friday as Maundy Thursday.