Stanford Drupal Camp - Site Building

Drupal Site Tuneup - Vroom Vroom!

Kristen Pol — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:48:38 +0000

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 Along the way, content, files, modules, and data can get outdated without you even realizing what happened.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.

At some point, you need to slow down and make time to do a site tuneup to get rid of old cruft and keep the site humming along. Ideally, this would happen before launch. Realistically, this might not happen until post-launch after the frenzy has died down and more routine maintenance mode has kicked in. But… it needs to happen, and it needs to happen regularly. How regularly depends on how much change happens on the site.

Come for a ride and we’ll talk about...

Tuning strategy - What types of things might need tuning over time, a strategy for managing and tracking these changes, and dealing with dev => stage => prod and features.

Tuning users - Finding and removing spam users.

Tuning content and content types - Identifying unpublished or duplicate content. Finding and removing fields not being used and identifying fields that could be removed. Analyzing content types for consolidation and changing node type on nodes.

Tuning modules and code - Handling unneeded modules that haven’t been disabled or were disabled and not uninstalled properly. Identifying modules that could be eliminated by removing or replacing functionality. Core and module updates, checking for hacks to core and community modules, and seeing if patches are still relevant.

Tuning views - Finding and removing unused views and identifying views for consolidation.

Tuning data - Safely finding and removing old variables, fields, and tables that weren’t removed properly by the system.

Tips to minimize tuneups - To make tuning easier going forward, we’ll talk about being more careful during the development cycle to introduce less “stuff” that might need cleanup later.

Vroom vroom!

About the driver/speaker:

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, and SEO. She has presented at DrupalCon Portland, several BADCamps, several Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out her drupal.org page for a partial list of presentations and check out more info at http://www.hook42.com/team/kristen-pol.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Kristen Pol

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Development

Site Building

Introduction to Content Types

cynmijares — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 21:51:40 +0000

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.

Slides:

drupal-camp-_custom-content-types.pdf

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

cynmijares

Track:

New to Drupal

Site Building

AbleOrganizer: Community engagement in Drupal done right

techsoldaten — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 04:09:19 +0000

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).

AbleOrganizer is available to download for free from Drupal.org. Now in Beta 2, this session will focus on new features that are available in the platform. Participants will learn about the following topics:

Collecting information from online communities
Tracking site activity through the dashboard
Presenting tailored lists of contacts
Creating custom reports and building a 'data-informed' organization
Managing the appearance of the system using drag-and-drop tools
Mobile integration and enhancements to the default interface

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

techsoldaten

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 16:00 to 16:45

Track:

Site Building

Intro to Views

cjwest — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 23:44:26 +0000

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

cjwest

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

New to Drupal

Site Building

Going with the Flow - Managing Your Publishing Workflow with WorkBench

dboeger — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 22:57:50 +0000

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:

present a simplified interface and dashboard for your editing team
provide refined access control to content that allows you to share the wealth or lock down the castle
create a worflow that adapts to you and your organization

All this and more and for the low down everyday contrib price of a little time and effort. Rock your content, show your editors some love, and significantly reduce your technical support calls. Its a win, win, win.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

dboeger

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 11:00 to 11:45

Track:

Site Building

Lean Site Building

markferree — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 22:16:19 +0000

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?
2. How can we meet our requirements in the simplest way possible?
3. What high quality existing solutions in Drupal already meet my needs?
4. How easy will our proposed solution be to maintain?

It is easy to fall into the trap of shopping for modules and seeing available modules as 'free' features for your site. We should start by looking for what we can cut rather than what we can add to a site.

This type of approach produces smaller more-maintainable sites that are still chugging along six months after launch.

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

markferree

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 11:00 to 11:45

Track:

Site Building

Site Building with Open Framework and Stanford's Themes

hyperboy — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 21:44:53 +0000

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.

View presentation slides on Google Drive

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

hyperboy

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 13:00 to 13:45

Track:

Design/Theme

Site Building

Rules: This is Why Drupal is Awesome

koppie — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 22:32:06 +0000

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:

Automatically reject users who don't belong in your organization
Set up reminders for tasks that are due soon

Bring your laptop and a development copy of your own website because this session will be hands-on.

As a bonus, I'll discuss why Rules is what makes Drupal awesome. Hint: It's because there's no coding required.

Jordan Koplowicz is a Drupal developer at San Francisco International Airport. You can follow him on Twitter: @koplowicznsons

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

koppie

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 13:00 to 13:45

Track:

New to Drupal

Site Building

Building Archivable Websites

ntay — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 19:30:28 +0000

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.

The default configuration of content management systems like Drupal can go a long way toward ensuring consistent application of archivability best practices across an organizational instance (though this session is broader in focus than Drupal).

Attend this session to learn more about:

Why web builders should care about archivability;
Web archivability best practices;
The state-of-the-art in web archiving;
Web archiving and archivability tools and services.

Experience level:

Intermediate

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

ntay

Session Time Slot(s):

Friday, April 18, 2014 - 15:00 to 15:45

Track:

Site Building

Live, Test, and Dev for (Nearly) Everyone

Sharon Krossa — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 20:02:23 +0000

How to do it and why you should

Having live, test, and development versions of your website isn't just for hardcore developers! Everyone, from beginner site buiders on up, not only should, but can follow this best practice. This session will cover the basics of why and how to use dev and test sites, as well as demonstrating easy ways to do so using Drush.

Questions answered by this session:

Why is it important to have and use test and dev versions of a site?
What are test and dev versions of a site for?
How is using live, test, and dev different for Drupal (compared to traditional static page web development)?
How do I set up test and dev versions?
How can I copy/clone my live site to the test or dev site?

Target audience:

This session will be most useful to site builders and maintainers with server access to their Drupal installations, such as those with sites installed on Stanford AFS or other providers that allow ssh access. While the general principles will be useful for those using services that do not allow server access, such as DrupalGardens.com or Stanford Sites (sites.stanford.edu), the specifics of the technical how-to steps will not be applicable to their situation.

Accompanying materials, aka "the handout":

SharonKrossa.com/livetestdev (forthcoming)

Experience level:

Beginner

Status:

Accepted

Speaker(s):

Sharon Krossa

Session Time Slot(s):

Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 16:00 to 16:45

Track:

New to Drupal

Site Building