How to manage all aspects of Drupal-based templates: design, deployment, support, community building, usability.
The Youth Agora team submitted the following session proposal for the DrupalCon Paris 2009 conference. Registered participants can vote for it after logging in on the DrupalCon site!
Drupal-based templates: design, deployment, support, usability
Your session in a few words:
How to manage all aspects of Drupal-based templates: design, deployment, support, community building, usability.
Track:
Code it, test it, deploy it
Level of expertise:
Beginner
Template websites are "distributions" of Drupal targeted at different organizations having common needs: for example, local branches of student organizations, or Universities that want to promote a Master Course through an online dissemination platform. In these cases, more than a plain Drupal, it is better to rely on a standardized template including Drupal, a set of preconfigured modules, an easily customizable theme and extra services.
Youth Agora vzw, a Brussels-based organization, will present its experience in creating Drupal website templates.
- Development process: identifying the needs of a template, maintaining and upgrading the template and modules repository automatically.
- Customization: designing easy-to-use, nicely customizable, themes, so that every every template can be adapted to fit the individual organization while retaining a common visual identity.
- Usability: designing contributed modules that guide the user through the process of fully personalizing and understanding a template.
- Sustainable support through community building: bundling documentation and means to easily provide feedback with each template; exploiting the similarity in the use cases of each template to build a self-supporting community, based on mutual help between peers and on collaboration (discussion lists, wikis).
- Aggregation: taking advantage of the common structure of the templates to build aggregator websites, automatically fetching information from the templates; monitoring installed templates with custom Drupal modules.
Two success stories will be used to exemplify the Youth Agora template-based approach:
- ESN Satellite, developed for the European Erasmus Student Network: http://satellite.esn.org (aggregator site: http://galaxy.esn.org) and now powering 200 websites in Europe.
- The Master Template, a template for Master Courses websites: http://europeancampus.eu (now in pilot phase, will cover 120 master courses around Europe by the end of the project)
The following modules and technologies will be addressed in this session: Drush, Content Complete / Complete, Base Theme (usability), Advanced Help / Helpinject, FeedAPI, XML-RPC and more.
Presented by the Youth Agora team: Andrea Pescetti, Antonio De Marco, Christof Devriendt, Peter Vanhee.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
