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Sooner, not later, you will end up in the Issue Queue on d.o. Its practically unavoidable if you want to get the most out of your relation with Drupal.

The more involved you get, particularly as a code developer or themer, you will find that you spend more and more of your time working on and jumping around between issues. The list of issues you are active in and/or monitoring is constantly growing.

At this point you have turned the issues queue into: Your Workplace!

Read the full "Our Drupal Workplace: The Issue Queue" post on www.tsvenson.com

Here's a quick video recap from Drupalcon Portland - Tuesday, May 21st. 

The hook_requirements (API Doc) hook allows you to define custom requirements for modules. The hook can be used to simply notify a site builder with an alert, this is how the Update manager module works. If you have the Update manager module installed and it discovers an out of date module, it'll display an alert that certain modules need updating.

As another example, in the past I've used the hook to display an alert if API login credentials were not available.

You can also define very strict requirements where the installation of a module is aborted when requirements are not met.

In this article we'll look at how to use the hook for install requirements that aborts an installation if the requirements are not met. Then we'll look at how to display an alert, similar to how the Update manager displays alerts.

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On a recent large Drupal project we were finding that the variable table was holding around 4 MB of data. The issue of course with this is that this is loaded into memory on each page request regardless of whether or not you use it. Another issue is that the variable table holds serialized data, and there is an additional CPU overhead of actually de-serializing the data as well.

Introducing Variable debug

So I wrote a module Variable debug that is a straight forward and simple module that attempts to do only two things (at the moment):

1. A list of the highest memory usage variables stored in the {variable} table sorted by highest to lowest. There is also a list of links to Drupal.org issues to help resolve some known high usage offenders. If you know of an issue that exists that aims to resolve in-efficient usage of the variable table, please raise a new issue in the issue queue for this module.

2. A list of all suspected orphaned variables in the variable table. This is determined by whether or not the variable is:

   1. Not a variable provided by Drupal core
   2. Does not start with an enabled module name

   This can help you find and remove potential abandoned variables that are of no use to you and your site.

Symptoms of rogue variables

Sometimes Drupal contributed modules use the variable table as a dumping ground for large variables that really should be stored in dedicated tables. Here is an example from one of our websites using the SQL query:

SELECT LENGTH(value) AS length, name FROM variable ORDER BY length ASC;

And the end of the result:

| 534 | hs_config_taxonomy-17 | | 551 | subscription_mail_status_activated_body | | 561 | hs_config_taxonomy-13 | | 573 | googleanalytics_custom_var | | 580 | article_import_known_columnists | | 600 | menu_masks | | 617 | order_completion_text_digital_auth | | 620 | menu_default_active_menus | | 622 | order_completion_text_corporate_auth | | 626 | user_mail_register_no_approval_required_body | | 638 | menu_minipanels_hover | | 660 | field_bundle_settings_node__page | | 666 | article_import_known_agencies | | 700 | field_bundle_settings_node__collection | | 702 | field_bundle_settings_node__article | | 733 | order_completion_text_print_auth | | 781 | field_bundle_settings_node__promotion | | 869 | order_completion_text_digital | | 903 | subscription_activation_text_unverified | | 939 | order_completion_text_print | | 955 | order_completion_text_corporate | | 991 | field_bundle_settings_node__subscription | | 1012 | subscription_activation_text_pending | | 1073 | field_bundle_settings_commerce_product__subscription_product | | 1278 | entityreference:base-tables | | 1783 | high_risk_districts | | 1988 | commerce_enabled_currencies | | 2356 | metered_useragent_whitelist | | 2515 | rules_empty_sets | | 2796 | apachesolr_index_last | | 3178 | memcache_wildcard_flushes | | 3673 | drupal_js_cache_files | | 7804 | features_codecache | | 14840 | drupal_css_cache_files | | 852329 | imagefield_crop_info | +--------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+ 1207 rows in set (0.02 sec)

Anything over several hundred bytes in the variable table really has to take a step back any look at better utilising cache tables.

Integration with Drupal.org issues

The next feature I added to the module was known large variables, and links to Drupal.org issue queue items that contain patches to resolve the large memory usage.

Here is a screenshot showing the functionality.

Questions

Let me know in the comments if this helps you, also if you have any other known rogue variables that have Drupal.org issues, that would also be welcome.

Tags drupal drupalplanet debugging code development Source Variable debug Category Tutorial

We just launched Zact, one of our largest design projects to date at Chapter Three. We designed nearly 200 comps, including an e-commerce workflow, a customer dashboard that mirrors the functionality of the phone’s software, a Support section built on ZenDesk, and a consumer-facing website.

A disruptive new cell phone provider, Zact is a new company looking to redefine how customers purchase mobile services by making your plan 100% customizable right from your phone with no overage fees or contracts. They even give you a refund every month for any unused minutes, texts or data.

Helping Zact overcome business hurdles
As a new company in a major market, Zact turned to Chapter Three to help them solve some of their immediate business hurdles online.

• Establishing brand trust
  To overcome lack of brand recognition and to educate new customers about the key advantages of the service, we created the “Why we're different” and “How it works” sections as a way for new customers to get to know us.
• Paying full price for the phone
  To educate customers about the long term savings of buying the phone at full price, we created an interactive Savings Calculator. The calculator allows customers to compare various plan and phone options to their current bill to show their dollar amount saved over a two year period.
• Buying a phone online
  Without the ability to physically touch the phone customers are buying, we needed to build in extra guarantees to make customers feel comfortable purchasing a device online. We featured a “satisfaction guarantee” statement prominently throughout the site, promising a refund within 30 days if the customer did not like the phone.

Herculean feats of UX strength
The complexity of interactions across the site gave us an opportunity to flex our UX chops. We collaborated with Zact’s usability specialist, incorporating feedback from weekly usability tests to iteratively improve our designs.

• Customer dashboard
  To provide the functionality of the phone’s software on the website, we designed a web-specific interpretation of the phone software that empowers customers to access and control the full breadth of Zact’s service offerings. Because the software was being developed in parallel with our web design, we adopted an agile design approach to iterate in sync with the development team.
• E-commerce
  Our team worked with Zact’s usability specialist to implement a checkout flow pulling from best practices across the web. We delivered a solution that pushes the capabilities of Drupal Commerce and its ability to integrate with third-party systems.

Agile design
An agile design process was critical in the success of this project. We needed to be flexible as requirements and scope were changing daily. We met with the client daily via WebEx with new design deliverables for review, which allowed us to gather feedback often and respond quickly. For any given page, we were able to explore a number of options on a high level before focusing on a more final solution.

In fact, some of the best ideas on the project came directly from the client, as a result of organic discussion during those meetings. The Savings Calculator, which allows users to more visually understand how they will save money over time with Zact, grew out of a conversation we facilitated.

Our first iterations of the Savings Calculator were pretty skeletal and didn’t quite feel right; the user had to fill out the form and click a button before seeing results. After further discussion, the client suggested that we make the actual dollar savings visible and dynamic throughout the page, so that as you interact with the form you can directly see how your savings are affected. This minor design change immediately made the page more engaging and an effective tool in communicating why Zact is a viable alternative to a traditional phone contract.

Starting up in Silicon Valley with Drupal
One of the most exciting and challenging parts of the project was the rapid pace of startup culture. The level of expertise and web savvy amongst Zact’s staff allowed for a flourishing partnership where we were able to push boundaries and do great work together. So far, the site has been covered by some major press outlets, including Gizmodo, Engadget, Forbes and TechCrunch.

The site is finally live, but our work isn’t over yet. We’re continuing to evaluate and optimize the usability of the site and will continue to roll out design updates over the coming weeks. We look forward to working further with Zact and seeing how users will react to the new site.

• Flight arrived late Sunday night and took the Portland MAX light rail to the hotel. Grabbed something to eat and went to bed 4PM EST!
• Had a descent breakfast at the hotel
• Went on the "Secrets of Portlandia" free walking tour (http://secretsofportlandia.com). This was a great tour. I highly recommend it if you come to Portland.
• Lunch (frozen yogurt!)
• Took a walk across the river to the Burnside Skate Park that Brent Dunn wanted to checkout.
• We then made it over the the Oregon Convention Center to get our registrations
• Met with greggles to discuss keynoting DrupalCamp Charlotte and some Classic security related questions. including security audits and Guardr/Hardened Drupal
• Worked on the DrupalCamp Charlotte website
• Dinner at a local brewery
• Worked more on the DrupalCamp Charlotte website

Blog Category: Drupal var switchTo5x=false;stLight.options({publisher:'dr-4334ed90-d702-124d-3358-aea68cdffdd9'});

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead, presents his six-monthly keynote at Drupalcon, and sets out where he thinks Drupal needs to go.

Dries starts by talking about a highly visible sign of growth in Drupal — 8 years ago he and half of the conference delegates were able to fit into one hotel room for drinks on the night before the event opened. This year, over 3,000 delegates took over and filled up most of the bars in Portland, Oregon.

Next he shows how the users of Drupal have grown too. He says that 3-5 years ago it was just a hope that one day the White House website, and major broadcasters like NBC would use Drupal. 

Dries then returns to a theme he has raised in previous keynotes — summed up by the phrase "Do Well, Do Good". He says that as a result of Drupal's success, and the success of the businesses and careers of those who work on it, the world is benefiting. Hundreds of thousands of charities and non-profits are able to download Drupal for free and adapt it for their needs, to better achieve their aims — raising money, organising volunteers and campaigning.

But also, there are now over a hundred countries whose governments use Drupal to help provide better public services online to citizens. 

The White House Case Study

To illustrate this, Dries introduces a video in which Macon Phillips, the Director of Digital Strategy at The White House, speaks about their use of Drupal.

Macon says that they launched WhiteHouse.gov on Drupal in October 2009. They did a lot of work to assess the best system for them to use, and whether they could adopt open source. They have had great success with their choice of Drupal. As a result they've been keen to give back to the community, and have contributed a number of modules, and hosted a 'hack day' at the White House.

He gives the example of the 'We The People' petitioning application. It allows anyone to start a petition, and anyone to sign it online. The executive has pledged to respond to petitions that get enough signatures. Since its launch in September 2011 over 8 milion people have signed a petition on the site. Something that would only be possible online. It's a new way to scale civic participation.

The open nature of Drupal means they can now extend this even further, and they have launched a Read API to allow other websites to pull in data about petitions. They are now also planning a Write API to allow other applications to help people create and sign petitions.

Context

Dries next moves to talking about context. He says it's the availability of these petitions online that enables more people to engage with them. What's true in government is also true in business. People need the right content, in the right place, at the right time. Context is key.

He gives the examples of Amazon and Netflix. Able to personalise their sites and give recommendations and related content to users. As a result they've been able to massively disrupt their markets.

However, most organisations are currently really bad at this.

Dries shows a google search for 'flight to London'. The first result is actually from Icelandair which does really well — when he clicks through to the site, it prefills the form with 'London' as the destination for him, shows images of London to get him excited, and even knows that he wants to get there from Boston where he is now. Meanwhile, the next result Google presents, Continental, just takes him to a blank search form when he clicks through.

Context can be about many things. Some examples are geography, past behaviour, intent, device used, the time of day, and many more.

By responding to the context, you provide a much better experience to the user — what is becoming known as Web Experience Management (WEM).

Web Experience Management

Owners of websites want to do this in three stages, each of which requires integration with other systems:

• Stage 1: Attract — by using SEO, mobile platforms, social networks
• Stage 2: Convert — using CRM systems, email, ecommerce, personalisation and marketing automation systems
• Stage 3: Analyse — using CRM, analytics and marketing automation

So the Content Management System needs to integrate with all these other systems.

But, Dries cites recent research that shows that marketers are really unhappy with the state of integrations between CMSs and other systems such as CRM, ecommerce, personalisation etc. Just 6% of those surveyed were able to describe the integration between their CMS and their CRM as excellent.

At the moment these kinds of sites are using big proprietary systems, and Dries says this level of disatisfaction presents a great opportunity for Open Source, and Drupal in particular.

How To Address WEM With Drupal

So how could we develop Drupal to serve the future needs of these organisations?

1. The Drupal community could build these kinds of CRM and marketing automation tools ourselves. That's what competitors are doing — creating proprietary product suites to try to handle it all.
2. Drupal could focus on being very good at integrating with other systems. There are many good integration modules already, but these could be extended and improved.

Dries says that research supports the second option. End users want 'best of breed' tools that work well together. So, if we don't go the route of building everything ourselves, what do we need to do?

What Clients Want from a CMS

The research, says Dries, shows that clients want three things from a CMS:

1. Integrate best of breed tools
2. Deliver a great mobile experience
3. Ease of Use & Content Authoring

Dries says that all of these are addressed in Drupal modules — but what's more they are all addressed in Drupal 8 core:

 

1. Integrate best of breed tools: Web services are now provided in core to facilitate these integrations; all content can be exported as JSON or XML easily.
2. Deliver a great mobile experience: Responsive theming makes for better user experience on mobile; the web services mean better integration with mobile apps; even the admin and editing interface is mobile ready or can be managed via an app.
3. Ease of Use & Content Authoring: The admin user interface and content editing forms have been completely redesigned; In-place editing allows content to be edited at a click in the frontend; Images can be added to pages with drag and drop; there is now a true Preview of content, and they are working on enabling this to preview at different screen sizes.

The first alpha of Drupal 8 will be released during this week, and the developers are working towards the code freeze deadline of 1st July 2013. The aim is to have a stable release by the end of 2013 or early 2014. Sites will be able to use Drupal 8 in 2014.

Dries summarises by saying it is important for Drupal to 'skate to where the puck is', and that it is no longer enough to simply manage content. Drupal has to be a key part in enabling site owners to manage the whole experience for users.

By moving in this direction, Dries says that developers get to work on what matters, Drupal companies get to deliver what clients want, Drupal users can improve their business by shifting more of it to digital, and for the world we'll be doing well, and doing good.

Today was a tribute to the Druplicon, our community's iconic Drupal drop: Lashing rain and a river of 3300 Drupalistas (biggest Drupalcon ever) flowing into a sea of attractions: Sessions and BOFs, the exhibit hall, a hilarious game-show moderated by Rob and JAM, Holly Ross' and Dries' keynote, the group picture, you name them. It's just amazing to see how the Drupal community is growing from year to year; Kudos to the Drupal Association for doing a great job. Before I let you enjoy Michel's pictures further down, Dries' key messages from the keynote: The future of Drupal is not about managing content, but web experience management / Drupal 8 timeline: Code freeze scheduled for 1 July 2013. Expect Drupal 8 to go into production in 2014.

         

I'm getting ready to head in to DrupalCon, where over the next few days I'll be talking education and open learning with anyone who is interested.

And as I'm heading in, I have MOOCs on the brain - not because I'm particularly a fan of MOOCs, but because of the tendency to take a great thing (in this case, information and interpersonal exchanges distributed broadly over the web) and reduce it into something that feels more manageable, but is ultimately something lesser (in this case, MOOC platforms). More on this later.

The Web Is Your MOOC

Part of the reason that I'm thinking these thoughts prior to heading into DrupalCon is that I've long held the notion that open source communities have been engaging in effective peer-supported learning, even while many for-profit companies and academic communities have been struggling to distill the process of peer-supported learning into something resembling a replicable product. From having participated in and built many types of learning communities over the years, simpler is often better - many open source communities have done amazing work with listservs and issue queues, and many more feature-rich platforms have withered because, over time, a site owners "must-have" feature is the post launch usability nightmare. There's a moral in there about user-centered design and user testing, but that's a subject for another post.

But getting back to MOOCs, the early MOOCs - the ones run by Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, George Siemens, (and yes, I know I'm forgetting people - please fill in the gaps in the comments) etc - encouraged participation from anywhere. If you had a blog with an RSS feed, you were in. Participants remained in control of their work (depending, of course, on the publishing tool they were using. Open source platforms generally offer more options for data ownership and portability than their closed brethren). The MOOC was like a marauding mob of information, with the potential to sprout anywhere.

It's All About The Portfolio

In the post-lifestream, post-MOOC era, it's been rare to see much excitement about portfolios. This doesn't surprise me, because like all good ideas, portfolios have been around for a while, and thus lack the shiny newness that generates great marketing copy. However, the need for the concept hasn't diminished - any time you see a site that promises to collect the sources of your learning into a single location, so you can show your employers what you know! - you should think, "portfolio." All of the sites that promise to simplify collecting and curating your digital footprint? Portfolios. A lot of the conversations around documenting and receiving credit for informal learning have their roots (and possibly solutions) in portfolios.

In the conversations we have had about portfolios over the years, we have seen three main barriers, or areas of misunderstanding:

• Distinguishing between a working and a presentation portfolio: simply put, the working portfolio is a running collection of just about everything you do. The presentation portfolio is a selection of elements from the working portfolio selected for a specific purpose. Portfolios can serve different purposes for different reasons, and the relationship between the working portfolio and the presentation portfolio is key.
• Portfolios need care and feeding over time: as mentioned before, the working portfolio is messy. Periodically, the working portfolio needs to be pruned and cleaned up. But, messy is great, and if it's not messy, that could be a sign that things aren't working as they should.
• Ownership and control of the portfolio: because most portfolio implementations are paid for by an organization, the organization usually controls access to the portfolio and any information in it. Organizational control is also seen as an essential element to assessment. However, this flies in the face of learner control and ownership of the means by which they learn. Ultimately, this is a data portability issue with implications for the learning experience. More on this later.

Concluding Thoughts

One of the things that has been particularly underwhelming about the corporate MOOCs that have cropped up is their uncanny resemblance to an LMS with an open enrollment policy. While there are many differences between the platform-stylehttps://chronicle.com/article/Providers-of-Free-MOOCs-Now/136117/ MOOCs and the original versions, the lack of learner control is a key element. Like Vegas, work in a MOOC stays in a MOOC (unless, of course, a company pays money to study student data).

In the platform-style MOOCs, the open web is missing. From a learner perspective, the portfolio is MIA. For a learner, throwing the evidence of your learning into a space that someone else controls isn't a viable long term strategy.

So, if you're at DrupalCon and want to talk open learning, let's make some time and sit down together. Open source, and the methodologies that support sustainable open source development, have a lot in common with open learning. I'd love to hear what other people are doing in this space.

Last Friday the annual one-day DrupalJam conference was held in the Rotterdam Feyenoord soccer stadium. The conference, which saw its eighth edition - if I recall correctly - is shifting to be more business focused with its new motto Drupal beyond the code, and was a great success with over a 100 participants. This blog post serves as a high-level summary of a couple of the talks that I attended.

This is an intervention.

CSS is pretty simple. Classes, IDs, elements and pseudo-elements, with style definitions attached to each. Calling it a "language" is a bit of a stretch (though preprocessors like Sass fit the bill).

But let's be honest, for years our stylesheets cascaded right on out to infinity.

Huge files with table-of-contents comments to try to make some sense of it — until a quick fix got pasted down at the bottom. Brittle style definitions relying on tight coupling with HTML structure. Pieces of styles being replicated here and there for different components with similar features, without any way to tell they were related in the CSS.

My stylesheets were like that too, because strategies for writing CSS had barely altered since the days when it was used to change the colors of the scroll bars in Internet Explorer. Luckily, in the past couple of years both CSS architecture and CSS preprocessors came into their own.

SMACSS, or Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS, was developed by Jonathan Snook, a featured speaker at Drupalcon Portland. I'm really excited to get the opportunity to have Jonathan speak, not only because of my personally well-dog-eared copy of SMACSS, but because Drupal itself is adopting a SMACSS approach to its CSS.

I spoke with Jonathan about sustainable stylesheets and the future of SMACSS. For an even more detailed look, please join me at Jonathan Snook's featured Drupalcon Portland this afternon, Tuesday, May 21 at 4:30 PM.

IB: What's the biggest mistake you see people making when writing CSS?

JS: I think the biggest mistake is thinking of everything in the context of a single page. We're no longer just building sites with a design for a home page and an inside page. We're developing complex systems that need to work in a variety of contexts and we need a development approach that complements that.

IB: What's the biggest "win" you see in using the SMACSS approach? Why should frontend developers change their approach to CSS?

JS: The biggest win is maintainability. The SMACSS methodology makes it easier to build larger projects by breaking things down into smaller components. Like the move from spaghetti code to MVC frameworks on the server side, this separation of concerns on the CSS side improves the process of putting a site or web app together.

IB: In the last part of your book, you talk about how the SMACSS approach fits in to work using a preprocessor like Sass. There have been a lot of developments in Sass in the past year — have they had any positive effects on your use of the SMACSS approach?

JS: With Sass, the introduction of placeholders was a positive step forward. Overall, Sass (and other preprocessors) are a great way to augment — but not replace — the way people write CSS.

IB: What are your thoughts on BEM? Do you see it as compatible with SMACSS?

JS: I see BEM as very compatible. BEM really enforces naming convention, which is a very important concept in SMACSS. They both take a modular approach to site development.

IB: What are you tacking next when it comes to CSS and frontend development? Will there be a "SMACSS Part Two"? Or something else entirely?

JS: I'd love to augment SMACSS with case studies and expand on some of the ideas in the book based on things that come up in the workshops I do. I'd also like to work on a prototyping/site development tool that uses the SMACSS concepts. We had built something like this when I was at Yahoo! that I think many people in the industry would find really useful. Hopefully I can find the time to work on it!

Image credit Flickr user stevensnodgrass. It's spaghetti! (As in code.)

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The first time I hosted code, I did it on Github. Naturally, I got really used to the slick interface for browsing through my remote files, viewing my commits, and generally visualizing what I had hosted on their site. So when I started contributing code to drupal.org, I felt like I was working in the dark. I'd send up my commits and branches, and trust that they were up there, even if I couldn't "see" them.

Little did I know, that you actually CAN browse through your code on Drupal.org.

Every project page has a little link at the bottom left called "Repository Viewer"

This link takes you to http:// drupalcode.org/project/<your-project>.git, where you'll find…

But those are just your commits. To see your files, click the link that says "tree"...

 

Your files were there all along… hidden in plain view.

If your curious about how it works, the display is generated using Gitweb, an open source project for viewing remote git repositories in a web browser. This functionality used to be available at cvs.drupal.org, before the community migrated to Git for version control, and the code browser apparently moved to drupalcode.org.

In this article I am going to show you how to embed a View in a template file (.tpl). Using a cool Views API function, you can render the display of any View and even pass it arguments.

A couple of months ago, after a particularly furious week of trying to contribute something useful to Drupal core, I woke up one morning to a see a lot of activity on my twitter account (Pretty much unheard of for me).  I had received this tweet from webchick (Angie Byron).

@alasdaircf Hey, thanks for all the CMI conversion patches! Keep 'em comin'! :D 

This was an amazing feeling as Angie is one of the core maintainers for Drupal and a really big name in Drupal .  But in a deeper way I think that it symbolises some of the things that I really appreciate about the Drupal community.

Drupal, probably like many other open source technologies, is very meritocratic.  There is very definitely some level of hierarchy, not everyone is a co-maintainer of core.  Talent and ability are important and are a huge part of what drives the technology forward.  But the fact that I got thanks from one of the major core maintainers demonstrates something else.  That isn’t to say that I don’t have any talent or ability, but I am relatively new to this whole world and at the moment I don’t have the ability and comprehension of others.

What I have is an urge to put a little bit of an effort in taking what I do know and taking a little bit of time to help and contribute back.  And a big part of why I have that urge is that the people involved in Drupal seem to at least have a real appreciation for any time that I put in. I have to say that this is unusual and special part of this community.  

Having been involved in music (mostly classical) for the majority of my life,  I can say that this is not the case at all.  Behind a lot of good amateur ensembles there are people that put in a lot of effort in organising.  But when it comes to the performing, people aren’t really there to pat you on the back for trying hard if they don’t think you are performing to a standard they would like to listen to.  I’m not an idiot (well not all the time), I know that there are lots of very rational reasons for why the two are very far apart and if I were to make a comparison with sporting activities, not having any ability is a real problem.  

However that doesn’t stop the fact that alongside all the other things that are great about the Drupal community it really is a community that appreciates effort.

It isn’t just Angie who has been really great.  A big thanks to Alex Pott, Daniel Wehner, Damian Kloip and Tim Plunkett particulary for helping me to get contributing.

Related Service Areas: DevelopmentTeaser: Alasdair writes about how great it is to be working in the Drupal communityCategories: CommentDevelopmentDrupal NewsDrupal PlanetPrimary Category: Comment

Just posted a new blog post to the Server Check.in blog: Moving functionality to Node.js increased per-server capacity by 100x. Here's a snippet from the post:

One feature that we just finished deploying is a small Node.js application that runs in tandem with Drupal to allow for an incredibly large number of servers and websites to be checked in a fraction of the time that we were checking them using only PHP, cron, and Drupal's Queue API.

If you need to do some potentially slow tasks very often, and they're either network or IO-bound, consider moving those tasks away from Drupal/PHP to a Node.js app. Your server and your overloaded queue will thank you!

Read more.

The UCSF Drupal Web Starter Kit project has been our most successful university project to date. It has empowered UCSF to roll out sites for small departments, offices, and researchers in a matter of minutes.

Just 3 months after launch, 70 sites have gone live.

Here are a few examples of sites leveraging the Drupal Web Starter Kit:

1. Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost
2. UCSF Depression Center
3. Drupal Web Starter Kit

The problem

UCSF has hundreds of small web properties for offices, researchers and small departments who don’t have the budgets and resources to create custom websites. Historically these groups have been left to their own devices to cobble together sites by whatever means necessary. These sites grow quickly out of date, are hard to maintain and rarely adhere to UCSF brand guidelines. 

UCSF created an initiative to build a Drupal install profile that they could offer to these groups at minimal cost and effort. UCSF turned to Chapter Three to design and build this solution.

The solution

1. A flexible information architecture

   Because this web solution had to work for small departments, offices, and researchers, we needed to find some common ground in how the sites were structured, while still providing enough flexibility for end users to modify the site’s structure to fit their needs. 

   We began by creating menu structure consisting of “Home, About, News, Events, Publications, Services and People”.  We arrived at this list after careful research of the commonalities across sites for the three key audiences. This meant that when a new website was created, the new client would have a primary navigation menu which was already created. They could then add items to the menu as needed, customizing it to fit their specific needs. 

   We also created specific content types for News & Events. Events were structured so that they could show upcoming and past.  Over time it is our goal to extend the project to create structure around more content including Publications and People.

2. Three different palettes 

   We collaborated with UCSF’s brand specialist to ensure that our designs were approved at the highest level to properly represent the look and feel of the University. We delivered three different color palettes of the template so that end users could pick the color scheme they liked most for their site.

3. Robust content display options

   To empower the admins to have more control of the key content regions, we designed a WISYWIG editor with the power to do far more than add text, links and images. All project administrators can add:

   • vertical tabs
   • accordions
   • tool tips

   Additionally, special care was taken to ensure that the back end system could be easily controlled by individuals who self identified as “non-technical” people.

4. Responsive design framework

   The future is device agnostic. As screen sizes multiply by the day, we knew that delivering a fully responsive site was paramount for the long term success of this project. We accounted for this with a fully responsive solution which provides legible content on any device interface. Since this solution was meant for hundreds of groups at UCSF, accounting for the long term viability of the website was fundamental to it’s success.

Thanks to UCSF

We appreciate the opportunity to work with an amazing client like UCSF. The project has been a resounding success for all involved. We look forward to building on this framework long into the future to better equip UCSF's groups with the tools they need to do their jobs. 

 

 

 

Here we go! Portland's Drupalcon is here. Here is a quick update about some of the exciting things that Metal Toad is bringing to the event. Stop by our booth (#207) and come party with us Tuesday and Wednesday. Come watch us record the podcast live and even step up to the mic if you dare. T-shirts, wine, stickers, foosball, Drupal!?!?! Whoa.

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Watch the Live Stream, courtesy of Brightcove

We'll be streaming each of our three keynotes live beginning on Tuesday, with Dries' infamous #DriesNote at11:30am PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, PDT | UTC -7).

Have a burning question you want to ask our keynotes? Michael Anello from the Drupal Easy podcast will be fielding and moderating your twitter questions in real time, to ask Dries, Karen, and Michael, following each presentation.

DrupalCon Portland is off with a bang! Over 1,270 people have already arrived to pick up their badges and DrupalCon tshirts, and we're expecting as many attendees to arrive tomorrow.

Today alone, over 498 training attendees rolled in, as well as nearly 90 attendees for the CXO event. We're expecting over 3,300 people to attend the conference this week, so don't get stuck in line, get here early and grab your badge before sessions start at 9:00am.

If you haven't registered yet and still want to attend - this is your chance!

Is anyone attending Portland DrupalCon 2013 interested in a BoF session? Could be a good way to get some more momentum or volunteers in this area.