Sink or swim: diving into Drupal at the

ANU College of Law

Fiona McCaskill Drupal South 2014 Wellington

I’m a dog and horse nut

• And live in the country

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Then

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Then

Previously…

• Content in home-built cms

• Internal authentication system for login

• File access to web server

• Costs: Dreamweaver licences

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Previously… login

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login

login

Finance website account

workstation

workstation

Web

serverfinance web editor 1

finance web editor 2

Finance web directory

Previously…Users

• No proper ownership of content

• Rogue/orphan sites & pages

• No revisions of pages

• No logging of editing by users

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Previously…Content

• Site used as file repository

• Content structure reflects internal college

structure

• Who was the audience??

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Why change?

• University adopting new branding

• Old expensive web server

• Half of campus on Drupal

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Why change?

• Website boring

• Tired

• Need for a CMS to manage content

• Out of date

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How we changed

• First attempt site wide revision

– Complete failure

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Challenges that we faced

• Staff resistance

• Technical hurdles

• Deadlines not set

• Too hard! Too big! Too much!

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How we got round ‘em

• Hired a scrum master

• Stakeholder buy-in

• 1 site at a time (chunks)

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Our scrum master

What worked

• Change is a comin’

• Info sessions

• Someone to input content

• Meeting with academic directors for each

program

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What worked

• “Hero” site as a demo

• “Rules” set by a governing body

Styles = branding + w3c accessibility

• Training

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Our “hero”

site

What worked

• Prototypes

• Client can see functionality available

• Less open questions

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Our people

……then

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Our people

………now

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Old menu

New menu

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Staff &

Student

services

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Old news

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Old events

New news & events!

• No coding needed!!

• http://law.anu.edu.au/news

• http://law.anu.edu.au/events

• All achievable without coding just some

basic html

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Image of old conference site

• Demo of new conferences site

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Old conferences

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Old conferences

New Conference site

• Consistency

• Automated from start to finish

• https://law.anu.edu.au/conferences

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What worked…. Drupal!

• Standard Drupal modules available free

– views, panels

• Content types, fields…

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Views

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Panels

content (edit

mode)

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Panels

content (view

mode)

Content types & fields

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Content type Label Name Type

Alumni person Date to display

Alumni person until

field_alumni_date Date

Intern Date to display

intern person until

field_intern_date Date

Visitor Visitor Date field_visitor_date Date

Content types & fields

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Content type Label Name Type

Alumni person Date to display

Alumni person until

field_alumni_date Date

Intern Date to display

intern person until

field_intern_date Date

Visitor Visitor Date field_visitor_date Date

field_person_date

How we’re doin… 3 yrs later

• 99.99% site chunks of information are live

on the new website

• Future direction for website set!

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Lessons Learnt

• Know your audience

• Expect staff resistance

• Use prototypes and some contrib modules

• Set deadlines

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Now

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