OSU Web Services

Central Web Services is continuously making improvements to our Drupal platform. We’re fixing bugs, updating modules, adding new features, and enhancing existing features. For the past 3 years we have been on roughly a six week release cycle. If there were important security updates it could be shorter, but frequently it was longer. We want to change that. We want to be able get new features, and fixes out to the sites that requested them in a much more timely fashion.

As part of our Agile Development process we have been implementing procedures for automatic testing and deployment of changes to our Drupal modules and features. This has made it much easier for us to find and fix bugs and make sure that a feature is ready for prime time before it reaches your site.

This will allow us to move to a two week release cycle. We will update all of the Drupal 7 production sites every other Tuesday. Sometimes these updates will be minor and provide no additional functionality, sometimes they may only include security updates, but often they will include enhancements to existing features, or new features entirely. We will communicate these changes through e-mail announcements to site managers, through the Drupal Support e-mail list, and through a post here on the OSU CWS Blog .

As always our goal is to help you create the best websites we possibly can. We think this change will really help in that regard.

As we’ve been talking to people about consolidating Drupal sites into larger sites in Drupal 7, questions come up about how to set up navigation for a much larger site. With academic units the navigation breaks down nicely along the lines of colleges, schools, departments, and programs, but with administrative units it is not always that clear. When Information Services was faced with this task a decision was made to de-emphasize the organizational structure and instead focus on the services provided. This makes a lot of sense as most visitors to our websites really don’t care that much about our department structure but rather what we do and what services are available to them. As CWS was designing how we would use Organic Groups to combine the old Drupal 6 sites into the new Drupal 7 site for IS we wondered how well OG would work with this service oriented approach. Fortunately IS had already done the hard work of coming up with logical groups of service categories, and the services within each one. We then were able to map the groups directly to the services, and organize them into “parent units” which were mapped to the service categories. By including the names of the service. and the category, in the site name header, we accomplished the goal of having these appear as distinctive sections of a website.

Each title is a link back to that level of the site, just as the site name has always been a link back to the front page.

The services based navigation solves many of the problems of organizing a large website, but sometimes there is still a need to represent the department organization as well. For example to see where people work, and where they are located, you still might want to have an organizational view of your website. At first we were not sure how to approach this, but then realized that we could have a parallel structure of parent units and groups that matched the department structure. So for example a parent unit for Media Services, and a group for Central Web Services. Once we determined the right approach this was easy to implement and works well in practice.

To see this for yourself please visit the Information Services website at http://oregonstate.edu/is . The services and categories are all in the “Services” menu and the departments are under “Directory & Contacts” => “Organization”. As you explore this site think about how we can use this model on your Drupal site when it comes time to upgrade it to Drupal 7.

[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.