Building Websites with Drupal

1. Building Websites with Drupal University of Calgary

2. Agenda • Choosing a branding strategy • Choosing a design • Choosing a tool • Campus wide rollout • Training users and migrating sites • Future directions • Lessons learned • Default Template • Policies and Procedures • Still Learning… • Examples of Sites • Breaking the Rules • Create a Site

3. The University of Calgary 8th largest University in Canada 28,000 FTE students 5,000 faculty and staff 18 Faculties, 53 Depts, 30 Institutes

4. Where we were • Decentralized responsibility • No supported tools • Variety of styles • Stale content • Orphaned sites • A dog’s breakfast

5. Previous U of C Main Homepage

6. Featured in the article:Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

7. Information Technologies Main Homepage

8. Faculty of Science Main Homepage

9. Faculty of Humanities

10. Prospective Students

11. Building the design A Main site B Faculties Driven by External Relations No campus input C Departments

12. Steering Committee formed • A bit late, but whatever… • Campus-wide representation: • CIO • External Relations • Information Technologies • Teaching and Learning Centre • Library • Student Services • Faculties • Three working groups: • design, technical, communications and training

13. Strategy for encouraging adoption • Provide an easy-to-use tool • No costs for user software • User software works on any platform • Provide a nice design • Standards based templates • Help people with migration • Allow people to run their own servers • Avoid using the hammer, but use it where necessary

14. Timeline Pre-launch Pilot Phase 1 Phase 2 Apr/06 Aug/06 Dec/06 Mar/07 ?? Choose a tool, introduce it to campus

15. Choosing the tools • Money available ($200K including 2 FTE) • Web only, browser and platform neutral • Picked some commercial packages (RedDot, ADX Studio, OmniUpdate) • Found champions for open source packages (Drupal, Joomla) • Had open presentations

16. Choosing the tools • Picked the best commercial and open source package • Ultimately chose open source (Drupal) • Group felt open source gave them flexibility • Some resistance to open source from steering committee

17. Timeline Pre-launch Pilot Phase 1 Phase 2 Apr/06 Aug/06 Dec/06 Mar/07 ?? Launch homepage, learn the tool

18. Implementation • Dynamic delivery vs. “scraping” • Update modes (build live, build and publish, etc.) • CSS integration • Drupal development • Pushback on the design • Failover • Capacity • As for our demo site…

19. New Main Homepage

20. Timeline Pre-launch Pilot (not!) Phase 1 Phase 2 Apr/06 Aug/06 Dec/06 Mar/07 ?? Campus-wide rollout

21. Campus wide rollout • Focus on faculties and pages directly linked from homepage • Offer of: • On-site demonstration of templates, styleguide and Drupal • Student staff member to copy/paste content • Space on UCIT’s server • Training classes and manuals • Worktime sessions • ‘Whatever it takes’ • Open demonstrations, Focused demonstrations, Training, Work-time sessions • Faculty group

22. Migration • Communication and technical staff • CSS publicly available for those who want to do their own thing • Some people are running their own Drupal servers • We are very open to installing new modules • Some units used consultants • Good cop / bad cop

23. Faculty Status

24. New Prospective Students

25. New Faculty of Science

26. New Information Technologies

27. New Faculty of Law

28. New Faculty of Humanities

29. Timeline Pre-launch Pilot Phase 1 Phase 2 Apr/06 Aug/06 Dec/06 Mar/07 ?? Exploration of dynamic features

30. Phase 2 – Moving Forward • Merging with MyUofC portal • Dynamic sites • Fine grained security control • Workflow • RSS and news sites • Blogs/ePortfolios • Deeper migration

31. Lessons Learned • Tried to have a pilot, never happened • Lots of work (scrambling) needed on tool • Templates allowed units to keep their personality • Had to redo CSS • We can't make it do everything • Phased in approach worked well • Tied into existing usernames/accounts

32. Lessons Learned • Redesigning websites opens up a can of worms • Styleguide very helpful • Some units were relieved that somebody else made the design decisions • Small units could get a nice website easily

34. Default Template • Default banner so important. • List of available banners. • Quick links – put some thought into what it will be as they tend to keep it also. • Highlight boxes – to showcase info. • List webmaster

35. Policies and Procedures • Just working on those right now. • Style Guide • Upgrading modules • Decommission of old sites • Naming conventions

36. Still Learning… • List of admin (who owns site) – up to date list would have been helpful • Script for creating sites and adding modules. • Mailman lists – users, admins, wcmteam • Survey to clients

37. Still Learning… • Passwords • Generic password? • Admin • Support?

38. Examples of sites • Secure Sites • http://www.ucalgary.ca/prizesandawards/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/familymedicine/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/asthmaupdate/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/sue/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/oia/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/mmi/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/itstaff/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/apsy/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/nativecr/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/cccr/

39. Examples of sites • http://cmss.ucalgary.ca/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/arcticexpedition/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/wcmsupport/

40. Breaking the Rules • Sometimes exceptions and breaking the rules can lead to innovation and change. If no one tried to break the rules we may not change. • http://www.ucalgary.ca/~eatond/microseismic/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/hkn/ • http://www.ucalgary.ca/hom/

41. Demo of creating a Site • http://wcmprod2.ucalgary.ca/train11/

42. Questions? Deb Huartson (huartson@ucalgary.ca) Dan Fitzsimmons (dpfitzsi@ucalgary.ca)