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U of L at DrupalCon Portland

U of L at DrupalCon Portland

The University of Lethbridge web team shares their experience at DrupalCon Portland 2013

Avatar for Josh Schroeder

Josh Schroeder

July 10, 2013

Other Decks in Technology

Transcript

  1. WHAT IS DRUPALCON? Largest gathering for users of the Drupal

    content management system Developers, designers, contributors, project managers Over 3,300 people in attendance We have previously attended Washington, DC; San Francisco; and Chicago
  2. MY EXPERIENCE “Spending a week immersed in the development community

    is a reminder that what makes Drupal great is as much the people as it is the software.”
  3. DrupalCon attendees worked together on a site to support Oklahoma

    tornado victims DOING GOOD WITH DRUPAL help4ok.org
  4. HOW OSU MANAGES LARGE SCALE DRUPAL Over a thousand Drupal

    sites Supporting legacy sites is holding them back Have begun consolidating sites to simplify infrastructure Variety of scripts to handle deployments Move to dedicated infrastructure to optimize services
  5. WHAT’S NEW IN DRUSH 6 Drush is Drupal’s command line

    shell Machine-readable output Support for Drupal 8 configuration management Ability to manage user roles and permissions Quick Drupal for setting up test environments
  6. MAINTAINING YOU DEVELOPMENT SWAGGER Application lifecycle management Drupal 8 config

    management changes are a huge win Investing in automation is essential; Human failure happens when doing it by hand
  7. BUILDING FOR A POST-MOBILE WORLD Mobile is no longer a

    feature we add. It's another place it has to work. Decouple content from presentation. Model the meaning, not how you want to display it. Tailor the editorial experience. Limit allowed tags, watch for abuse. Manage one pool of content. Structure content for remixing. Flexible chunks beat content blobs.
  8. USING TWIG New theme engine for Drupal 8 Discussed 7

    pain points of PHPTemplate in Drupal 7 Twig brings better separation of logic and presentation Post-conference sprints brought this much closer to reality
  9. TREVOR’S EXPERIENCE “DrupalCon Portland 2013 offered sessions on a wide

    variety of topics. I attempted to attend sessions that would directly benefit the work we do at the University of Lethbridge in some way.”
  10. HOW OSU MANAGES LARGE SCALE DRUPAL Automation - There are

    so may ways to automate some of the things that we are currently doing manually. Drush provides many tools for doing this. Install profiles to simplify configurations Organic Groups - It may help us limit the number of individual websites that we launch and provide an easier way to amalgamate several sites into one more manageable website.
  11. SECRETS TO AWESOMIZING YOUR EDITOR'S BACK-END DRUPAL EXPERIENCE Our content

    editor's experience is bad. It's not Drupal's fault - it's our fault. Simplify the WYSIWYG editor Get rid of unused node form settings Field Group module to organize and order your node edit/add forms Client-side Validation module - works with field validation to provide feedback before the form is submitted and more...
  12. SCALABLE AND MODULAR ARCHITECTURE FOR CSS Naming conventions - clarifies

    intent Decouple CSS from HTML - code for the system, not the page Check out “ ” - game made entirely in CSS CSS Panic
  13. FUTURE FRIENDLY CONTENT WITH DRUPAL We need to make better

    use of meta data with our content types. We need to change the Author Experience. We have to give them what they need, not what they want. & are two books that are indispensable. Content Everywhere Managing Enterprise Content
  14. THE ZEN OF HTML PROTOTYPING & DESIGNING IN THE BROWSER

    Separate UX/UI from style With HTML prototypes the site functions as if it would on the live site Comparing frameworks against home brewed
  15. MANAGING RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN WITH SASS AND BREAKPOINT “Be Device

    Agnostic and Future Friendly” Breakpoints vs. tweakpoints Get to know Compass Symmetric grids vs. asymmetric grids
  16. DAN’S EXPERIENCE “I found this conference to be a great

    learning experience. Having the chance to network with so many people that form the Drupal community was amazing. I especially like the fact that we could talk with the presenters after the session if we had even more questions and found this to be very beneficial.”
  17. HOW OSU MANAGES LARGE SCALE DRUPAL Organic groups to handle

    disjointed navigation Drush and the Provision module and go further with Fabric Dedicated server to handle just the University main page
  18. WYSIWYG IN DRUPAL 8 Multiple file uploads are now supported

    Configuration for ckeditor much easier No ckeditor dialog boxes - New dialogs themed from Drupal Paste from Word - Tags are validated before saving
  19. DIFFERENT WAYS TO CONTROL YOUR LAYOUT Display Suite module Learned

    about simple page layout Search can be themed with Display Suite Bean module and how it turns blocks into entities and nodes
  20. MAXIMIZING YOUR SERVERS Debugging methods MySQL optimization tips How to

    avoid developers bashing heads with sysadmins (hint: testing)
  21. USING THE DRUPAL 8 CONFIGURATION SYSTEM Configuration now stored in

    yaml files - removed 50 tables from Drupal database! Anything that is not an entity is configuration Rollback configurations (still in discussion) Performance will take a bit of a hit Improves development workflows enormously
  22. THE JOY OF COOKING WITH CHEF Chef is infrastructure as

    code Vagrant VM recommended Create your own recipes and cookbooks After you build the vagrant file you can share this with your teammates learnchef.com
  23. ANGELSEA’S EXPERIENCE “As a first time Drupalcon’er, I had some

    great exposure to the community that has developed this product and gained some good hands-on experience learning more about theming. I was particularly impressed with the content and user experience streams that are so integral to building usable, effective websites.”
  24. CONTENT FIRST PLANNING Drupal is surprisingly effective at putting content

    first Keep focused on purpose and content; away from process/deliverables Focus on priority, NOT layout Content models an interesting idea. Use diagrams to clarify requirements, encourage collaboration
  25. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF DESIGN? We can’t solve problems

    based on personal preferences, but user and business aligned goals Use a statement of design intent /purpose statement Instead of somebody telling you what and jumping into the how , ask rather WHY?
  26. THE WEB IS NOT PRINT WYSIWYG was created for laser

    printer output. Why is it applied to web? People read differently on a variety of devices Move away from aesthetics and towards meaning We need to focus on the lost user experience: AUTHORS Semantic metadata: Not a tech problem, but a human problem Stop thinking about web pages and start managing content packages
  27. RESEARCH, RESEARCH PLANS, USABILITY TESTING Not all design feedback is

    created equal. Beware of self- reporting. Don’t try to prove things right or wrong. Focus on goals, are they being accomplished? Don’t gather research alone Continuous engagement - if you’re solving a problem for someone, users will be intrinsically motivated to help you make it better Continuous feedback cycles - touch on lifecycle of users (application, enrollment, study, graduation)