Florida High School Athletic Association goes Drupal!

The Florida High School Athletic Association is pleased to announce its new Drupal based website! Read below for details on how the theming and development was accomplished.

About the FHSAA

The Florida High School Athletic Association is the official governing body for interscholastic athletics in Florida. The FHSAA sponsors championship programs through which over 100 teams are crowned state champions in 30 sports each year. Through participation in these athletic programs, an estimated 798,500 students annually are extended opportunities to receive lessons in leadership, sportsmanship and citizenship.

FHSAA.org History

The official website of the Florida High School Athletic Association, FHSAA.org, has been in operation since 1998 (original version on archive.org), and has been flat HTML files for most of it's life. In the mid-2000's it was switched to server-side includes running under classic ASP. This presented serveral problems including different themes for different pages, many broken links, and inconsistent content. At Google's last count, the FHSAA.org website had over 14,700 individual pages and documents. Many of these documents are outdated and unused. The website currently receives between 5,000 and 25,000 visits per day depending on sports, championship events, etc.

Redevelopment Goals

• Integration into one common theme - Previous versions of FHSAA.org had several themes integrated into separate parts of the website. They did not have standard navigation, masthead, or page elements. One of the primary goals for the CMS integration is to integrate all the pages under one common theme.
• Easier ability to manage - Previous versions of the website were managed by editing the HTML through Adobe Dreamweaver, and then transferring the files via FTP. This presented several problems including all content editors needing copies of Dreamweaver whereever they need to edit the website.
• Set up different permission levels (roles) - We have several content editors who only need to edit certain types and categories of content.
• Consolidation of data - Within the previous website versions, if a change neededbe made, it would have to changde in many different places. Inevitibily, changes would get missed and outdated and invalid data would result.
• Increased Usability - The previous website was difficult to navigate due to inconsistent menu structures, multiple superfish fly-out menus, and broken links.
• Elimination of old/unused/invalid data - Throughout the 12 year history of FHSAA.org many html files and documents have been placed on the server, and then unlinked to. These files never see the light of the day, but may result in broken links if removed.

Theming

Ninesixty was chosen as a base theme for the new design due to the ease of postitioning all elements. The css was overriden to allow for 4 pixel gutter widths through the custom css generator located at http://www.spry-soft.com/grids (please note that you need to replace all underscores with hyphens).

Admin Usability

Usability from the conent editor's point of view is important in the FHSAA's situation, as not all editors are highly technical. Rootcandy was choosen as the administration theme, but the main interface to the data is through the following:

1. Use of the Admin module
2. Creation of custom pages and blocks using Views Bulk Operations which were then integrated into the Admin module UI.
3. Content HTML is created using CKEditor via the WYSIWYG API module with several plugins including IMCE, Node Embed (one of the modules contributed from WhiteHouse.gov), and CKEditor Link.
4. Each content type has its default format selected using the Better Formats module.
5. Data is run through the WYSIWYG Filter module in the default input format. This enables the site administrator to set which HTML tags, attributes, and attribute properties are allowed.

In addition to the Administration interface, each content type has a description, and each custom CCK field has help text where applicable.

New Features

In addition to streamlining current functionity Drupal brings additional functionality to the table.

• Calendar Module - The FHSAA's entire yearly calendar was imported to the calendar module. This enables several types of views to be created, and also enables us to filter the views using taxonomy arguments on specific sport pages, so only sport applicable data is presented on the appropriate pages. Several exposed filters were set up within the views to enable specific coaches/athletic directors to drill down to their respective points of interest. The calendar module also provides an iCal export feature, which enables school personel to import the calendar into Outlook or other calendar applications.
• RSS Feeds - The FHSAA has published one RSS feed, and plans to add several more where needed. This is easily done through the Views module.
• Content Revisioning - Drupal's built in revisioning system enables content editors to revert revisions if necessary.

Increased Usability

As one of the primary goals of the CMS, increased usability was handled through

Consistent theme/navigation throughout the website. The Megamenu module was used for the primary navigation. Drupal's standard menu was used for the secondary (header and footer) navigation, and the Menu Block module was used for sport and department specific naviation.

Common header tags were defined in both the theme's CSS file, and within CKeditor's CSS (so the content creator can view the text with the appropriate style). In addition, the External Links module is used to visually differentiate external links and email links.

Consolidation of Data

Consolidation of data was done primarily through referencing items through views, and through node reference (included with CCK). When creating specific types of content (headlines, calendar items, etc), the content creator can reference forms easily through the node reference widget. This ensures that it will always reference the most up to date data.

Performance

Performance is currently handled using Drupal's built in caching mechanisms. The Boost module is currently installed and tested, but is not enabled through the .htaccess file at this point. Since launch, the site generates pages consistently under 1 second, with the entire page (images, stylesheets, etc) loading within 5 seconds. Mysql has been optimized by setting the query_cache_limit, and its continually being tuned in accordance with the Tuning Mysql article on Drupal.org.

In addition the settings.php file has been modified in accordance to this article on 2Bits.com to give quicker 404s when a static file (such as a jpg, gif, or css) does not exist. This should help free up resources as the FHSAA.org website has many deep links, and some linked HTML files still reference files that do not exist.

Data Migration

Data migration was largely done manually though several bored interns and one bored system administrator (me!). Most of the previous data had horrible and invalid markup including several levels of nested tables, un-semantic css, font tags, inconsistent styling, open tags, etc. This data was largely copied and pasted into Dreamweaver, where several macros were set up to strip/modify the markup. Then the HTML was manually fixed and transferred into the new site. At last count, there were over 3,300 nodes created. So, as you can imagine, this was a very lengthy process.+

Because the URL structure changed, several 403 redirects were set up in the .htaccess file to allow for popular deep links to continue working. In addition, the Custom Error module was implemented to give helpful error messages on 404 page not found pages.

Thanks!

Thanks to Ryan Price (liberatr) from Drupal Easy for help in figuring out a specific tough Jquery issue in addition to a Views issue! Also, a special thanks to the Drupal community as a whole. The community is really what makes this CMS stand out among all others.

Partial Module List