Month: May 2013

[youtube http://youtu.be/iUglNnO0s5M]

 

The close of Drupalcon 2013, held in Portland, has left me with lingering, fond memories of 3,300 nerds gathered in a glowing Drupalicious camaraderie.  The convention was a great success, despite the rain and ever present Wi-Fi issues.

So what, you may ask, was my personal highlight?  Maybe it was the tantalizing sneak previews of Drupal 8 with all its built-in mobile goodness?  Perhaps it was the really excellent sessions that were provided in the brand new and much needed Education and Government track?  Or, was it possibly getting my photo taken with User-1 himself, Dries Buytaert, and giving him some of our very own OSU Drupal swag?

These were all great things.  Really they were.  But, ultimately, they all pale in comparison to the keynote address given on Day Two, in my eyes at least.

This particular keynote, “Thriving in a World of Change: Future-Friendly Content with Drupal”, was presented by Karen McGrane, a world-renowned user-experience designer and content strategist who has led content projects for The New York Times, Conde Nast, and Time.  In addition to spearheading projects for enormous publishing corporations, she’s also a managing partner at Bond Art + Science, a UX consultancy she founded in 2006, and she teaches Design Management in the Interaction Design MFA program for the School of Visual Arts in Manhatten.

In short, this lady knows her stuff, folks.  If you’re a content author, site architect, or web developer on any platform, I strongly suggest taking a peek at what she has to say regarding content structure and strategy.  You will leave more informed.  You might even be a little entertained.  You certainly won’t be sorry.

Please note that the actual keynote begins at 11:30 minutes into the video.

This was the biggest DrupalCon yet with over 3,300 people, and a substantial number of them were from Higher Ed. My presentation on how we do Drupal at OSU, was the first day of the conference, so I had people connecting with me the rest of the week to talk about how they are doing Drupal at their school. For the most part we are ahead of most of the other universities I talked with as far as our use of Drupal for our campus websites. Some schools have accomplished more on the technical side of what can be done with Drupal, but do not have the buy in from the majority of campus the way we do. Few schools have been as successful in providing centralized Drupal hosting and development as we have. I attribute this to our partnership with Web Communications. It is clear that the schools in which the IT and Marketing departments have formed good working relationships are the most successful when it comes to providing a high quality unified web experience across the institution.

Another big topic of discussion was in the way Drupal is used, not just in education but everywhere. We call Drupal a content management system, and indeed it is a very powerful content management system, however for the most part we, and others, don’t really take advantage of these capabilities. We tend to use Drupal more as a Web Publishing System, which really is very different. What people have wanted out of Drupal is for it to be like a word processor for the web. People like the wysiwyg tools and the familiar Word-like tool bar. The problem is that the web is not like a printed document. It was a fairly easy leap from print publishing to web publishing when web pages were viewed on desktop systems that provided roughly the same page size as a printed page. We have now irreversibly moved beyond that to where we need to be able to deliver our content to devices of every size and configuration. The old word processor model fails miserably in this new environment. Many of us in web development have strived for years to separate content from presentation. This has become more important now than ever and Drupal can really help with this, but not if we continue to embed HTML markup into our content through the use of a wysiwyg editor. Rather content needs to be managed with metadata that semantically describes what the content is, not how it should look. So we say that a piece of content is an address or a phone number, or a course description, or a an event title, etc. Then we can present the data in the best possible way for whatever device is displaying it. For the web this is still HTML markup, but for other devices it may not be HTML at all.

In working with departments on their websites recently we have been trying to put this more into practice. We still see so many sites where people have hard coded directory information like names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. This data then is  carved in stone in that it is really difficult to keep up-to-date. What we want to do instead is to treat the content as data, and store it in fields, and then use views to present the data in a variety of formats. Drupal is really good at this, but we’re not fully taking advantage of it’s strengths. If we start now we’ll be in a much better position to deal with the next game changing device that comes along and needs to display our web content.

This was a great DrupalCon for OSU. On Wednesday night there were about 15 of us that went out to dinner. We rarely get a chance to socialize like this a work and we really enjoyed it. We vowed to continue building the OSU Drupal community and to include some social gatherings at least every couple of months. We don’t want to have to wait until the next DrupalCon to get together again. So if you work with Drupal, or the web in general. Please join our community group and attend the next meeting. More information is at http://drupal.oregonstate.edu.

At least 12 of us from OSU will be at DrupalCon next week in Portland. This is an exciting opportunity for us to connect with people from all over the world who are involved with Drupal. This year DrupalCon is offering a new track for Government, Non-Profit, and Education. For the first time at DrupalCon there will be sessions devoted to the unique challenges we face as a university, as well as sessions that showcase what some of our peers are doing with Drupal at other institutions. I have the honor of presenting the first of these sessions in which I will discuss how we’ve managed to support such a large scale Drupal environment, and some of the interesting things we are working on. My session has been selected as a featured session – http://portland2013.drupal.org/program/sessions/featured . This really puts the spotlight on OSU as a leader in the Drupal higher-ed community, and extra pressure on me to represent the university in the best possible light. This is a great honor for me and I’ve been working hard to make sure I have a good presentation and that I’m well prepared to give it.

One of the challenges we always face at DrupalCon is to make sure we stay focused on the issues we need to solve here at OSU. This year there will be a lot of sessions devoted to the upcoming release of Drupal 8. Of course we are hard at work on Drupal 7 and still have a long way to go getting our sites onto that version. We know we have to balance our need to stay current and make sure we understand the new things that Drupal 8 brings to the table, with our need to find solutions to the things we’re encountering everyday as we move further into Drupal 7. Fortunately there will be a good mix of sessions that should allow us to do that, and even though there will be much buzz about Drupal 8, we know it will not see wide spread usage for at least two more years.

This will be a busy week, packed with lot’s of learning opportunities, and meetups with people doing the same things we are using Drupal. A couple of us may try and do some blog posts during the week so stay tuned to this spot for updates.

—
Paul Lieberman
Central Web Services