Drupal 6/7: Responsible Drupal Development

UNDERSTANDING WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT
(EVEN WHEN IT IS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY)
Eric Sembrat
Advanced Computing Services (ACS)
Kennesaw State University
March 2012
Thursday, April 26, 12

GOALS FOR TODAY
(AND A SHORT INTRODUCTION)
Kennesaw State University - Advanced Computing Services

OUR GOAL
What will should everyone get out of this presentation?
Understanding what makes a good
website.
Detailing what a content-management-
system is good for (and bad for).
Explaining how you can get the most out
of your Drupal site.
Answering your questions!

WHO AM I?
Eric Sembrat
Drupal Lead Developer at
Kennesaw State University
Point-of-contact for BCoE Site
Redesign (2011)
BS in Computer Science - Georgia
Tech (2009)
MS in Information Systems -
Kennesaw State University (2011)
Who is presenting all this information to you, anyways?

WHAT MAKES A GOOD WEBSITE?

WEB DESIGN 101
It’s more than just content.
Web design is composed of three main
pillars:
Accessibility (can your users access
content?)
Content (can your users use, read,
and absorb content?)
Style (can your users appropriately
navigate through and to content?)

WEB DESIGN 101
Style takes a few forms across a website:
The actual theme itself (colors,
background images, logos).
The font selected for headings, text,
captions, etc.
The usage of images within specific
pages.
The look and feel of dynamic elements
(such as image galleries, etc.).

WEB DESIGN 101
Accessibility answers the question:
“Can users actually find content on my
website?”
Making text readable and selecting
appropriate images.
Constructing logical menu hierarchy
and ensuring the menus are
consistent.
Making sure the theme and your
content do not clash.

WEB DESIGN 101
Content concerns itself with the actual
meat-and-gravy of your website.
Pages of content, attachments.
Downloadable documents.
It’s what someone comes to a website
to get, which is information.

A BAD EXAMPLE
An example of how to give your users a headache.

WEB DESIGN 101
Bright colors hurt eyes.
What do you think makes a bad website?
Bad content?
Bad layout?
Mix-matched fonts?
Background colors?
Animated icons?

A GOOD EXAMPLE
An example of how to give your users a pleasant experience.

WEB DESIGN 101
What makes classy content?
What do you think makes a good
website?
Lots of images?
Stylish fonts?
Good navigation?
Flashy content?

WEB DESIGN 101
Bridge into CMS.
We’ll go more in detail into each of these
categories in a few minutes.
But for now, we’ll go over what makes a
content-management-system (CMS)
such as Drupal so helpful when
designing websites.

WHAT’S A CMS GOOD FOR,
ANYWAYS?

ALL CONTENT, ALL DAY.
CMS - Taking theming out of your hands!
A CMS allows you to worry exclusively
about content and not about
presentation.
When editing pages, you should be
concerned solely with what the page
says and what information you want to
link to.
Almost all of the styling (minus bold/
italics/underline) is handled by the
CMS.

WEB DESIGN 101
How look and feel is handled by Drupal.

CMS - Taking theming out of your hands!
A CMS takes Theming (and parts of
Accessibility) out of your hands.
Your goal then should be to ensure
that the content on the site is as user-
friendly as possible.
Your secondary goal should be to
ensure that the accessibility of the
content (menus, navigating between
pages, links) are relevant, straight-
forward, and helpful.

MAXIMIZING WHAT DRUPAL CAN
DO FOR YOU.

Content Editing like a pro.
Good practices for content editing:
Use the built-in text-editing
functionality.
Bold, italics, underline, headings
1-6, bullet points.
Don’t concern yourself with font
colors, sizes, specific spacing.
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

COPYING FROM WORD
Troubles with Word to Drupal? You’re not alone.
From previous experience, copying from
Microsoft Word causes more problems
than it fixes.
Microsoft Word’s formatting does not
mesh well with Drupal.
Word’s formatting is often
inconsistent across paragraphs.
This is doubly so when pasting items
from Microsoft Excel to Drupal.
Solution?

COPYING FROM WORD
A solution to keep you sane.
Solution - copy the text only.
Within the editor, there is a button for
copying text only.
Use this to copy text only into your
page, then apply formatting from
Drupal to get the intended look and
feel.

USE HEADERS
Why go against a uniform look?
Drupal has a feature to use Headers for
segmenting and separating content.
Use these headers in place of custom
fonts or font-sizes, since they are
uniform across all pages on your site.

DESIGNING MENUS
Creating helpful menus.
Your menu items should provide an
appropriate outline of all pages on your
website.
Major sections of your site should not
be excluded from the menus.
Each item on your menu should have a
page with content associated with it.
Your menu should act in the same way
that a chapter of a book does.

DESIGNING MENUS
Creating helpful menus.
Overwhelmed by menus?
Sometimes, it is easier to sit down with a
blank piece of paper (or a Microsoft Word
document) and catalogue each area and page
on your site.
This can allow you to play around with
grouping pages before actually building or
assigning the content to menus.
Planning can help your site grow in the long-
run.

MENUS - A GOOD EXAMPLE.
Kennesaw State University front page.

MENUS - A GOOD EXAMPLE.
Georgia Tech front page.

ALL ABOUT TEXT DOCS.
DOC versus PDF, who wins?
For text documents, the following
metric should be used to determine how
to upload your files:
PDF - For documents that do not
require someone to type in
information at their computer.
Word - For documents that require
someone to type in information at
their computer.
What should you use?

PDF is victorious.
PDFs are the preferred choice. Why?
Accessibility.
Record the amount of time it takes a
user to open a PDF file versus a Word
document.
Do the same for printing a PDF file
versus a Word document.
Word documents are slower to open,
and some users may not even have
Microsoft Office installed.

PDF is victorious.
PDF reigns victorious for accessibility:
Macintosh, Windows, and Linux have
built-in viewers for PDFs.
Users don’t have to install any software
to view PDFs.
Fonts do not change in PDFs
depending on the Operating System -
a font in a PDF on Windows looks the
same on a Mac.

COMMON ISSUES

CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT
There’s a department for that!
Custom content and design can be built
by the Advanced Computing Services
(formerly ODG):
Custom panels
Video Galleries
Slideshows
Image Galleries
Right-Hand Navigation Boxes

CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT
There’s a department for that!
You should not be trying to build custom
content layouts by yourself.
Using tables to create columns of
content, for example, is bad.
This causes issues with updating, can
misalign text and other elements, and
is not a uniform solution.
You can request future development on
your site at the ACS website.

THE LIST OF ‘DO NOTS’
Headers - use what Drupal gives you.
Making your own custom headers is not
recommended in most cases:
Each header you create will be
unique/custom per page (and
different across all College of
Education sites).
Colors may not follow the KSU Style
Guide.
You should instead be selecting the
headers from Format.

Colors for text.
Coloring text is not recommended for
almost all cases.
Like in professional emails, text color
takes away from the seriousness of the
content.
It can also be distracting.
It is non-consistent.
You should be using bold, italics for
important information.

Don’t worry about page margins or the layout.
For almost all cases (except for special
pages such as the College of Education
front page), your page is composed of a
single left sidebar and a content area.
You should not be using tables or
other methods of having page-length
text-formatting.
We can develop this for a page if
needed, but it is not necessary.

Pasting can be your best friend, or your worst enemy.
You should refrain from styling your text from within Microsoft Word
for your Drupal page.
Pasting from Microsoft Word to Drupal will bring in styling that is
often hard to remove and overrides the Drupal’s theme.
This is bad and can cause major frustration to future editing.
When in doubt, remember to Paste as Plain Text when pasting
content.

Filenames can be your biggest enemy.
Files uploaded to Drupal with special characters can cause issues for
your site and lead to the file being unavailable for your visitors.
Special characters include [space], $, @, &.
Anything that is not alphanumeric or an underscore (_).
Reason?
“Hello World.doc” becomes “Hello%20World.doc” to Drupal.
The file becomes inaccessible.

CLOSING REMARKS

IN SUMMATION...
Working with Drupal can be easy, if you go about it the right way.
With the transition from Dreamweaver
to Drupal, the role of a site-editor has
shifted to maximizing the content and
accessibility on your website.
This is a major positive, as it means
you no longer have to toy with layouts
and worry about accidentally deleting
a sidebar.
Your users will thank you.

SUPPORT GROUP
We’re here for you!
If you need help, there are a
number of sources you can
go to:
Ask our department!
Attend an ITS Drupal
Workshop.
Read the ‘Guide for Site
Editors’, provided by ITS.

DEMOS?
Anyone have any specific requests for a quick demo?
Drupal can be cumbersome and a bit daunting to learn the intricate
tasks of site maintenance:
Menu creation.
Page creation.
Webforms.
If you have any questions about using any of these tools, please ask!

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS?

Drupal 6/7: Responsible Drupal Development

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Ähnlich wie Drupal 6/7: Responsible Drupal Development

Ähnlich wie Drupal 6/7: Responsible Drupal Development (20)

Mehr von Eric Sembrat

Mehr von Eric Sembrat (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Drupal 6/7: Responsible Drupal Development