One of the toughest things for me personally is coming up content for a new website. Specifically things that resemble an "about" page. I find it significantly easier if I'm given a starting point and something to work from. Once I get started I have no problem writing some decent content.

To make things a bit simpler for couples using Wedful wedding websites we decided to create default nodes with example content. This way users aren't given a blank slate when starting out. We've set up eight default pages to give them a bit of a starting point with the content on their site. Each page contains some example text or questions to give the users an idea of what to write.

This post is just to give an overview of some of the techniques we use to build our Wedful websites product. I'll be discussing most of the things listed here in more detail in later posts as well, but thought this would make a good starting point.

Every single wedding website is a complete Drupal site, they don't share users or any data with any other wedding sites. We wanted to go this route so that each site had complete control over it's theme and domain name among other things. It also allows us to balance our server load by moving very active sites to servers with more resources.

I just added a simple twitter feed to one of my sites and thought I'd share what I did. The only other post I could find about was this one http://drupal.org/node/151185 and I didn't really think it should be necessary to write any code (and especially not any db queries) views could do all the display stuff I needed.

As I think anyone who reads my blog knows, over the past year I've been working on a startup idea with Sam. It's basically a wedding website builder.

I left my job at NowPublic almost exactly a year ago to focus more on travel and working on my own things, and I've been quite successful in doing just that :). Thinking back, my time has been split almost exactly between travel and work and it's been a really awesome time and enjoyable balance.

Today we're /finally/ launching the private beta of Wedful and if you're interested in checking it out just let me know (or better yet, signup for a beta code on wedful.com). Also, if you know anyone who has a wedding coming up in the next while and might be interested we'd be happy to hook them up and possibly even get a custom theme done for them.

We're starting a new wedding blog that will mostly focus on Wedful specific things, online wedding planning topics, and other things we think are cool (related to weddings, of course).

On /this/ blog, I'm going to start posting a lot more technical entries to explain how things were done on Wedful. Primarily Drupal things but also a few other types of hurdles that we needed to get over to build a product with Drupal as the foundation.

It's been super fun building this project and so far a really an awesome experience. Over the next few months I'll be able to start working on a bit more innovative features and getting into a realm that I have pretty much no experience in, marketing :).

Not only is the area in and around Cape Town one of the most beautiful places I've ever been it's also full of awesome wineries! It's been about two months since I was last there, but I've been wine tasting in the area four times now and I think I'm starting to get an idea of what I like here. I love South African wines, not just cause they've got a lot of great ones (and that I'm forced to drink it because of the sheer lack of quality beer in the country ;-) ), but also because of the price. For the same quality of wine I would pay at least twice to three times the cost in Canada.

The selection is also massive. If you've ever been to Argentina the price and quality is about the same, but I think the selection in South Africa is a bit broader. South Africa's signature grape is the Pinotage and it seems that almost every winery here carries one.

There are several wine regions within easy driving distance from Cape Town, I've only really spent any time in two of them, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek Valley. Stellenbosch is a comfortable distance from Cape Town for making short day trips to. When Scott Mac was here we decided to spent two nights in Franschhoek and it worked out great for getting to taste at a ton of wineries.

My favorite winery that I've probably ever been to was Vrede en Lust (Franschhoek). The wines had some very unique flavours and I'd especially recommend the Viognier (and I don't even really like whites!) and the Mocholate (a Malbec). The main downside to this winery is that they don't sell to bottle stores and you'll need to either live close to them or join their wine club to get wines from them on any kind of a regular basis.

The restaurant / shop at Vrede en Lust also does olive oil tasting (mmmm!). I don't think they do olive oil themselves, but they had probably a dozen olive oils from South Africa and Italy. My favorite was the Waterfall River (Franschhoek), which was a bit stronger in flavour than most of the olive oils produced in this country (that I've tasted).

I think my two runner-ups for favorite winery are Tokara (Stellenbosch) and Fairview (Paarl). I love Tokara, not just for their wines, but also the view and atmosphere. Such a beautiful winery looking down over the valley. They also do their own olive oil and have tastings. They're a bit milder than I prefer, but still have some nice ones. The wine at Tokara is pretty nice too ;-). I can't think of any that really stood out to me though, but absolutely worth a visit.

Fairview winery is more of a tourist attraction than winery, but a great place to spend a couple hours to do wine tastings as well as eat at the restaurant or have a picnic. Fairview is HUGE, not only do they have a few brands of wine under them (I believe Goats do Roam and La Capra to name two), they also produce several (super nice) cheeses! And they do cheese tastings right alongside the wine tastings!!! There's a small fee for tastings at Fairview, but well worth it. After we finished doing tastings we bought a bunch of cheese, bread, and a couple wines and had a picnic outside and watched the goats. We didn't get a chance to try the restaurant as there was a two hour wait to get a table. The one wine that really stood out to me from Fairview was their Tannat. It's not easy to find this one outside of their winery either, and apparently there's only two wineries in SA that actually make a Tannat.

Boschendal (Franschhoek) is another winery I've really enjoyed visiting, not specifically because I enjoyed their wines (though I did :) ), but because of the atmosphere. The wine tasting at Boschendal is done sitting at picnic tables under a giant oak tree. Again, this one isn't free, but the cost to do the tasting is quite cheap at about R20 or R25 (can't recall exactly). Last time we were there we also bought a plate of nice cheese to go with it.

Spier (Stellenbosch) is one of the closest large wineries to Cape Town. I think Spier must be one of the biggest wineries in SA, and although none of their wines have really appealed to me they're quite affordable for the quality. Spier is really a huge tourist attraction, in addition to wine tastings there's also a Moyo (had terrible service and not much food selection when I was last there though), a huge gift shop, and bird and cheetah watching. I think there's even a hotel there.

South Africa also has some great sparkling wines (known as Cap Classique). One winery that we particularly enjoyed these at was Haute Cabriere. They also make brandy there, which led to us getting sufficiently buzzed for 10:30am :). The restaurant / tasting room is essentially built into the side of a mountain. It was quite an amazing building with great views over the Franschhoek valley.

There's plenty of places I enjoyed that I'm leaving out here. And of course we've hit a few duds as well, but I've tried to put those out of my mind ;-). If you get a chance to visit Cape Town for a few days (maybe for FIFA World Cup), be sure to take at least a day trip out into the nearby wine lands. Not something to be missed.