Site Building

Beep beep!

During the development process, your site goes through many changes as you figure out which modules to use, solidify your content types and views, configure features, and deal with bugs in core, community and custom modules. Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened. This is even more likely with a larger development team and when development is going fast.

What is a Content Type? Drupal, by default comes with a couple right out-of-the-box. We'll customize existing Content Types and talk about why you would want/need to create a new Content Type.

AbleOrganizer is an open-source community engagement platform built using Drupal and CRM Core. It offers an effective platform for engaging communities using built-in fundraising, event registration, online petitions and volunteer management. The underlying Drupal-based CRM system also provides a platform for configuring your own features, and represents an excellent tool for organizations that need to get started collecting information about people (quickly and easily).

Shhhh it's a secret, but of the box, Drupal delivers a sub-par workflow experience.  

I know, it's a shocker, but with some work, and some tears, and some more work, and some cursing, and some radio button click fests, and some more work, you can make a tolerable workflow using permissions and roles.  Buuuut, it's still not great.  

Enter WorkBench!  

TaaaDaaah!  A great workflow and dashboard for your team!   This session will walk you through how to set up WorkBench and it's associated modules to optimize your workflow.  

WorkBench will allow you to:

When a lot of Drupal developers first approach a site they often have a particular distribution, set of modules, or approach in mind. Every site starts to look like the perfect candidate for your particular variety of Swiss army knife.

With over twenty thousand modules and dozens of distributions to choose from the total number of possible solutions for a site approaches the exponential.

I propose we take a step back and approach projects with these type of questions:

1. Is Drupal a good fit for this project?

In the first part of the talk we will use Stanford as a case study for how we have employed a “content first” approach to designing centrally-provided responsive themes for use across the university, and specific tools and techniques we have developed along the way.

In the second part of the talk, we will demo the features of Open Framework Drupal 7 theme and Stanford's Drupal theme stack.  We will also go over the recommended modules to use when building sites with Open Framework.

Rules is a big, scary module that everyone tells you is your best friend and totally easy once you figure it out.  Turns out it's true, and I'm here to help you get over the learning curve.  No coding required.

In this session, I'll explore a couple specific use cases where Rules can automate actions and make your life a lot less painful:

Archivable websites help to safeguard institutional legacy and collective cultural heritage, facilitate website recovery and reference, increase web usability by mitigating link rot, support legal compliance, and improve access for search engine crawlers.