#MW2015 Workshop: Drupal Site Building: The Big Picture

MW2015 Workshop: Drupal Site Building The Big Picture | April 8th, 9.00 am to 12.00 pm
George DeMet, Palantir.net, USA, Larry Garfield, Palantir.net, USA

This interactive workshop session is designed to help museum Web professionals more effectively leverage Drupal’s unique strengths as a content management platform.

Modern Web design demands visual systems that ensure content is delivered to our myriad devices, from smartphones to tablets to desktop displays and beyond, in usable ways. It requires thinking in terms of content that gets presented, often in a variety of different ways, rather than simply presentation.

Drupal has for years handled content independent of a particular design, in a sort of platonic content ideal. That makes designing for a Drupal development project a perfect fit for design systems-thinking and results in greater efficiency and better quality. Using a smart design systems approach paired with good content strategy results in a project that fits amazingly well with Drupal’s own design and capabilities… if we can recognize how to unify them. Using examples from the upcoming Drupal 8, we’ll demonstrate how modern, modular design systems and practices can map directly to Drupal views, view modes, image styles, and other common site building tools. We’ll explore several leading ways to build and manage a multi-headed Drupal installation, including Domain Access, Organic Groups, and Multi-site.

Throughout the workshop, we’ll also discuss things that internal Web project teams and external vendors can do to maximize the potential for success on complex Drupal projects with lots of stakeholders.

At the end of this workshop, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of how Drupal works as a system from end-to-end, and how you can leverage Drupal’s strengths in a way that ensures maximum potential for success. Drupal enables you to bring together design components, content strategy, data modeling, and site building in a unified way that results in better sites that are built faster and with more consistency.