Drupal Best Practices for Small Organizations and Small Budgets

facilitated by Jack Aponte

Participants

• Scott, David, Jack, and Thiago, experience w/ drupal
• Jack started working with drupal at 4.7
  • Considers self a site builder.
    • Some would say web developer, but they write very little custom code.
  • Focus on core + a toolset of widely used, supported and stable modules.

Overview

• "We're going to look at how people can make practical, long-lasting sites using tools that are often reusable and shareable without writing custom code, and getting mired in complexity."
• Works mostly with small budgets 10-15k sometimes less than 10.

Using Drupal

• Q. "Why would you pick Drupal over Wordpress"
  • Avoid writing custom code, doesn't want to live in code-land.
  • Wordpress has gotten more powerful (beyond post+page), Wordpress is catching up.
  • Views is a clincher, the sort of control you have makes the difference.
• Nonprofits often get stuck with sites with tons of custom code (specially in older version of Drupal, before best-practices and modules 'floating to the top')... this creates costs over time.
• Use exciting modules,
  • but for key pieces of functionality, page layout, navigation, taxonomy use "tried and true" modules.

How to define "Tried and True????"

• Number of maintainers
• Frequency of commits
• How recently commit activity occurred
• Who maintains it (this takes a while, but with familiarity you start to see who documents well, what tends to work etc).
• Open issues, specifically bugs (for your version of drupal)
• Does the maintainer tend to reply to issues?
• Maintenance status.

Tips and Tricks

• http://dgo.to (takes you to http://drupal.org )... http://dgo.to/MODULE_NAME (takes you to the project page for a given module)
• Use Git!
  • Explaining git a bit...
    • Helps you recover from problems!
    • Also helps you store configuration changes in code ("exportables" : features, we'll get to that later).
• Learn to apply patches!
  • http://drupal.org/patches/apply/

FEATURES walkthrough (http://dgo.to/features)

• Take something like "news and announcements"
• You can repurpose stuff for other sites!
• Why rebuild it for every site, when very little changes between implementations.
• Describe what components make up a feature
• "News and Announcements" Content Type
• Dependencies often get automatically added (views, fields, etc).
• Then they get exported to code, as a module.. and you can commit it to git.
• Move it between installs.
• Or install it in a new site that has similar functionality.

Drush

• DRUSH! it's complicated, powerful and feature rich!
• Update all your modules, automate tasks, save thousands of clicks.
• drush fd - features diff - what changed in my database (via the ui) from the code version of my feature (code).
• If there are changes that aren't in code yet, it will show as "Overidden"

Case Study

• Usecase: [usworker.coop]
• Cost in the 15k range, but it does a lot!
  • Quirky requirements
  • Two domain names
  • One drupal install / database / codebase
  • Two themes
    • [institute.usworker.coop]
    • [usworker.coop]
  • One CiviCRM
  • "Theres a module for that" : Domain_Access
  • There were some issues with the NodeAccess ( no space _ ) module... access to different roles for different Nodes.
  • Panels
    • Works nicely with views.
    • A nice way to make layouts, there are tons of layouts premade.
    • Custom pages for say "taxonomy term pages" or a specific thing "my for members page"
    • Overview of the node_view panel page... which lets you override the main node layout.
      • You can drag and drop panes in your layouts.
      • You can show bits of content to specific users and user types.
  • You can also do things for specific nodes of specific sites.

Some cool modules

• Basic toolkit
• Views
• Panels
  • Mini panes (exportable)
• ChaosTools (ctools) - needed for Views and Panels and has a bunch of nice little helper modules
• Features
• Backup migrate (They just use it for backup, can be set up to backup the DB x times a day)
• Login Toboggin (allows for email, improves the access stuff)
• Admin menu (improves the admin experience)

Admin Modules and Themes

• Module Filter

Themes

• Adaptive theme

Other

• Palante WYSIWYG is a nice feature that bundles a bunch of wysiwyg configuration.
• WYSIWYG - CKEdit
  • And drupal 8 is going full CKEdit (3.61, 4 is still iffy on integration with D7)

• File field sources
  • Uses IMCE (file browser for media assets, and is shared with your WYSIWYG)

We're going to add Jack's BADCamp notes here

• http://pad.riseup.net/p/badcamp-notes-102613
• http://pad.riseup.net/p/badcamp-notes-102713