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• Out of date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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