say no to special snowflakes and scale - 2016 twin cities drupal camp
TRANSCRIPT
Say no to special snowflakes and scale
Drupal as a service for higher education
Kevin Crafts @kevincrafts
Manager, User Experience & Interface Design
University of Colorado Boulder
We Made Lots of Sites
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We Made Lots of Sites
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We Made Lots of Sites
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We Made Lots of Sites
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We Made Lots of Sites
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We Made Lots of Sites
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One Codebase To Rule Them All
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Web Expressgithub.com/CuBoulder/express
drupal.org/project/express
• Web Express is available to all colleges, schools, departments, faculty, and student groups free of charge
• Approaching 1,000 installed sites, all running on the same Web Express distribution
• Deploy monthly updates with new features, improvements, and bug fixes
• Monthly training sessions where each attendee gets their own Web Express sandbox
!Web Express
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Student Group
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Faculty Website
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College/ School Site
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Campus Website
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Non-academic Website
Our Team
""" "Senior Developer
& DevOpsSenior Developer Developer Developer
& Designer
""" "Information Architect
Information Architect
Training & Support
Support & Production
"Director
DecisionsMaking things easier on us
How can we support & maintain 1000+
websites?
Strict Permissions• There’s a lot of things our users are NOT allowed to
do
• Our users are not Drupal experts
• Our users are not website designers / developers
• In many cases our users are not even communication or marketing professionals
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These were the right decisions
Theme & Design
Branding Standards are your best friends
One Theme To Rule Them All
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Base Theme
Child Themes
Minimal CSS & HTML Changes
Starting SimpleExpress Core & Add-on Bundles
Profile Module Manager
https://www.drupal.org/project/profile_module_manager
Express Add Contenthttps://www.drupal.org/project/express_add_content
Saying No
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
- Steve Jobs
What We Learned
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Develop / Design for the 90%
Make tools that you want / like to use
Embrace branding standards and visual
guidelines
Make your service free(if possible)
Working on multiple custom projects distracted us from being able to create roadmaps for future
releases and enhancements
We needed a staff member dedicated to training and support
Removing ability to add modules, themes, content types, css, etc
enabled us to diagnose problems quickly
Simple core functionality made training and
support easier
Inline help links reduced the number of support
tickets we receive
Automated testing helps us prevent most bugs from being
deployed to productions websites
What about Drupal 8?
Web Expressgithub.com/CuBoulder/express
drupal.org/project/express
Questions?
Kevin Crafts @kevincrafts
Manager, User Experience & Interface Design
University of Colorado Boulder