Small Drupal and talking web development principles and sustainability

Small Drupal

• some folks have worked with Drupal, some have not
• Nonprofits that have annual budgets of $500,000 or less (small budgets for websites)
• Limited resources is not just money, it is also about time
  • people who work at small non-profits are already stretched really thin (orbs that do not have a dedicated staff member to managing the web project)
• Develop goals and best practices for Drupal on a small scale
• Drupal gets a bad wrap, sometimes even small orbs need some of the tools that make Drupal more powerful than Wordpress
• Views module is the most common reason for people to chose to go with

Drupal

• allows you to form very complex content queries with a GUI interface
• Create relatively complex SQL statements
• Can use views to create resource libraries
• Content Types allow you to create very intuitive forms for end-users
• to fill out to create their content

• How to use Drupal without hitting pitfalls (too difficult for organization to use, etc.)

• Small Drupal projects, small budgets, with tight timelines for small organizations

• What are the best practices to support these principles:
  • Work within the time and expertise restraints that non-profits have (don't impose a development process that is not within the engagement capacity or expertise of the client)
  • Not building a bunch of things that will cost a lot of money and time that the organization will end up not even using (example: regularly updated blog or other timely content, comment moderation, etc)
  • Create a site that can be hosted and maintained relatively easily by the client, as lightweight as possible
  • Create a site that isn't a nightmare to upgrade in the future
  • Use tried and true modules that have a lot of community support and are actively maintained

• How do we reach these principles?
• Do not write custom code (modules, php hooks, etc) because lots of organizations cannot afford to maintain that code as it rots, creates security holes, etc.
• Use version control to recover from mistakes or going down the wrong path.
• Using things like the features module to export configurations to code