How EPA/ORD Moved to Drupal 7 Jessica Dearie U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development Office of Science Information Management
Jessica Dearie ◦ IT Specialist – Federal Government Employee ◦ Web Application Developer turned IT Project Manager ◦ Member of the DC Air National Guard Javier Gonzalez ◦ Software Engineer, AboutWeb ◦ Technical Lead – ORD Drupal Migration Effort
Old CMS was on it’s last leg Embracing Open Government Initiative moving to Drupal Eventually – all EPA intranet content will reside in an enterprise roll out of Drupal
Distributed Content Management ◦ Most CMs had little to no Web CMS experience New Information Architecture Migrate content from two sources: OpenCMS and WordPress ◦ Not all content from either would migrate Use One EPA Workplace site design IE 7 as our agency standard browser
Easy to manage content OneEPA Web Theme created User Controlled Calendar Filtering Blog(s) News Articles Online Newsletter Group pages have slideshows, content boxes, filtered events
Two separate systems to migrate from ◦ openCMS and WordPress How to map old content to new architecture “Scrapping” a lot of old content Strip all styling (lot’s of bad code) Maintaining WordPress settings (topics and tags) Incorporating new URL patterns and Node Hierarchy settings
Drupal 7 ◦ LAMP stack ◦ Two Servers Development and Production Content not managed on development server – used to test new features ◦ Lots of Contributed Modules and a few custom ones
Organic Groups Node Hierarchy Context Calendar, Date … (several Date type modules) LDAP FAQ (eventually adding FAQ_Ask) Webforms
The Good ◦ Organizational (and some non-org) groups created. ◦ Group pages were customized to create a template for organizational home pages ◦ Multiple roles within each Group ◦ Content managers can manage users within their group The Bad ◦ Does not play well with editorial workflows
The Good ◦ Menus managed dynamically ◦ Content stays well organized The Bad ◦ Hard to manage once site gets large The Ugly ◦ Menu links to external content (I know, I know) requires admin Menu access ◦ Breadcrumbs for content outside the hierarchy – Custom Breadcrumbs and Node Hierarchy fight for breadcrumb access.
Allows block placement to be easily managed Display menus created by Node Hierarchy Displays fields of certain content types in sidebar Display special role-based links (Add Event, etc) Display filtered event content by group on group pages
Created Event content type, and then built a filter-able calendar Events use 2 taxonomy vocabularies – ‘Organization’ and ‘Event Type’ Exposed Filters allow users to filter calendar
The Good ◦ Use existing Active Directory Accounts to generate Drupal accounts The Bad ◦ Internal network issues has caused authentication problems
The Good ◦ Ability to create FAQ categories with Taxonomy and then generate FAQs based on topics ◦ FAQ pages have many nice display options The Bad ◦ Breadcrumbs (Due to Node Hierarchy) ◦ Each question is it’s own content node The Ugly ◦ To make FAQs truly effective, and ready them for the FAQ_Ask functionality, each question must be written so that it stands on it’s own.
The Good ◦ Quick and easy form creation ◦ Used for comment boxes, simple forms, etc The Bad ◦ Inability to easily customize the submitted field key presents difficulties trying to POST forms to external applications
Basic Page (with sidebar displays) News FAQ – (created by FAQ Module) Group (OG group/Org home pages) Featured Content Blog Newsletter and Newsletter Article OSIM Service Catalog
Workbench + Workbench Moderation ◦ Doesn’t allow content managers to assign their own sub-editors – Adding users to sections still relies on admins Media ◦ Too many issues for migrating our files with Media ◦ Not enough time to develop a full solution ◦ Still investigating how to implement further media requirements
Make sure your development staff has the right kind of Drupal experience – and a lot of it! Organize – figure out how you want to organize content - hierarchical vs. taxonomy based Plan for requirements you expect to have, even if your content managers say they don’t need it. Media Management – make sure you have enough time to select a media solution – especially if you are doing a migration.
Invest in training for your content managers Make sure the interface for content managers is intuitive ◦ Customize your interface Dashboards Admin module Do your Research! ◦ Lots of modules do similar things ◦ Spend time in the issue que ◦ Invest in researching your modules before you start using them
Rolling Drupal out to Lab and Center Sites ◦ Each site runs it’s own technology (ColdFusion, Lotus Notes, Dreamweaver templates, etc) ◦ Theme in additional navigation area ◦ Features that will be available to all News Blog Calendar …