This group's creation is the result of a growing need in the community. The history isn't as important as the desires of a number of Drupal administrators/content editors to find a way to share issues, resolve questions, support each other and learn more about administering Drupal sites in the process.
Several people have been instrumental in the creation of this group: Michelle, Kronda Adair, Fanaile, Arianek, David Hernandez and more. I became involved after I began answering questions (though I'm not at all an expert) about Drupal site administration and realized that there was a need for sharing of experience, after answering questions on StackOverflow, LinkedIn, DC Web Women, etc.
Once we have answered some of each others' questions, it is my hope and intention to find a home for the knowledge on Drupal.org
I also thought we might create a wiki page to get the process rolling, and to keep track of our progress.
What drew you here?
Comments
Thank You
This is exactly what I've been looking for. I'd be happy to share here - with my nearly one year experience - I may not be a vital source.
You'll be a fine source of
You'll be a fine source of experience and information, Michelle. Welcome!
Best, Marilyn
Great work starting this group
I came seeking contact with others in similar situation: site administrators who aren't developers; looking to find/help with solutions for which documentation of knowledge that is common to some can be difficult to come by for non-developers.
Same here. As a journalist,
Same here. As a journalist, my questions are more nuts-and-bolts about how to accomplish a task using Drupal. Too often, the discussion is more insider talk, the way car mechanics might discuss automobiles.
Let's keep it positive though
I know how frustrating it can be, ithacaindy. One of the issues that has been mentioned to me is that so much of what we need to know depends on how our sites are built, what features we have requested, etc. That seems to be where many developers stop, and then say that my issues are covered by training. I'm not sure, but I do think that once you've climbed the famous learning drupal curve, you tend to forget the little things that made it so difficult in the beginning.
I really don't want this to be a place to trash each other, though. Let's stick to what we've learned, what we still don't know, and how to help improve the situation. I'm excited, hope we accomplish a lot together.
So, tell us some of your experiences.
Best, Marilyn
Using Drupal and recalling
Using Drupal and recalling using Drupal can often elicit two different feelings. I can remember using Drupal and bring up its power and flexibility. However, a few hours trying to put a site together recalls all the frustrations - sort of how you remember only the best moments from past relationships until a reunion, where you slap your head 'oh! that's why we broke up!'
But seriously, I've had two different 'flavors' of Drupal experiences: the basic Drupal install and the customized distribution, such as OpenPublish. OpenPublish solved many of the most common problems with the basic Drupal install, such as lack of photo cutlines and such, but introduced others like reliance on customized modules or finicky modules.
Currently, I'm trying to work on a basic Drupal install, but with a handful of modules, such as Caption Filter for the photo cutlines. Still, the road is long...
Great idea, thanks for
Great idea, thanks for starting this group!
http://www.webbfx.net/
Hi
My name is Roy, I'm a Ux designer for Drupal core, and eager to learn about the needs of content editors. We definately want to improve the content creation tools that Drupal offers out of the box for Drupal 8. So, I'm listening and, created a stub wiki page for an initial braindump for this group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/143274.
Roy, you might want to see Mojah's work
Roy, over in the Theme Development group, Mojah posted a screenshot of a great interface for content developers and a description of a highly effective method of usability testing. Take a look: Fixed position "floating" submit buttons rocked our user testing.
Thanks for your help, Yoroy
Hi Yoroy,
I'm excited about putting our ideas together in this group. I've realized that both content editors and web managers might need some different kinds of support, in addition to improved content creation tools. Unless... content creation tools can magically solve some of these issues.
Here's a little example: As web manager, I've had a wonderful relationship with our developers, and a pretty good one with our content creators. I sat in the middle, had done the wireframes, site design and client-side project management of the redesign/development in Drupal of our website.
I knew to tell content editors ALWAYS to strip out Word code when copy/pasting. But what I didn't really know was the possible effect if they didn't. Several times I wrote up issues for Image X Media (our devs) that wound up being caused by Word code where it shouldn't be (anywhere on a Drupal site). It took down all main column content on a page once, but left menus and blocks (including the one the code was in, I believe). I felt pretty dumb when I heard the reason for the error was Word code that I hadn't found.
Another example: I asked our content creators to revise pdf/image names not to use illegal characters, but I didn't actually know which ones were illegal. I focused mostly on underscores between words (I still don't have a good list of which characters shouldn't be in file names for image upload). I didn't realize that they had forgotten to do that, and more than once, an image couldn't be uploaded correctly. Again I wrote up issues for the queue. Felt pretty bad when the answer came back.
And it's not only me that has these problems. We, non-coders, need to learn a lot more about possible problems. I'd love to see a wiki that explored all of the little things that can go wrong, so that we could be more proactive, rather than reactive. And lots of folks don't have good support contracts in place. I was actually very lucky to have developers who would patiently explain what had gone wrong no matter how many times it happened.
Best, Marilyn
What a Great Idea!
Thanks, Marilyn, for organizing this group. I've been knocking around here feeling like I'm the only one in this predicament. It would be great if we could meet by Skype or IRC now and then. (I've tried getting help on IRC, and it seems like the conversation is always on a plane that's askew to my own.)
In answer to your "legal characters" dilemma, I would simply tell folks that if it isn't a letter in the English alphabet, a number, or a dash, it doesn't belong in a filename. I myself am not sure which ones are legal and which aren't, but I've seen spaces accepted in some systems but rejected in others, ñ accepted in one system and rejected in another, users confused as to whether an underscore in a linked URI was an underscore or an empty space, and so on.
And if they sneak in some other character now and then and it turns out to be legal, so be it. But if it isn't on my very short list of approved characters and it breaks the page, it's their responsibility to fix it. At least it is in my dream world. ;-)
I like your idea re legal characters in file names
Hi Cliff, sounds like the right definition to me. The issue of course is that Word users are for some reason encouraged to use underscores and spaces and who knows what else. I do believe MS Office training is a major headache for web managers with more than a couple of content editors.
They have to change their accepted behaviors for the web, and forget to do it all the time. In fact the more Word-like the interface, the worse the issue, I think. That may be the real issue with WYSIWYG editing areas. I think we need a little title directly above that says "ALWAYS scrub your content!" or something. The little icons aren't noticed with you're copy/pasting. I make the mistake myself, and I KNOW not to do it.
Skype sounds fine, or we might start a web manager's group on IRC (probably not enough of us comfortable with it or on it enough of the time, though). No one else has mentioned it; let's see if anyone else is interested.
Best, Marilyn
how do you clean text?
do you use "paste from Word" in the wysiwyg, convert the Word to plaintext and paste, or use a plain text intermediate step?
we've occasionally gotten bad formatting from any approach other than just dropping the text from word into a plaintext editor, just drop and copy back out, then paste into wysiwyg ... this never gives any trouble
also, neat trick i saw the other day; if you have wysiwyg's set up to insert line splits between paragraphs, if you do shift-return at the end of a line instead of just return, you wan't get a line split
All of the wysiwyg editors
All of the wysiwyg editors should have a "paste as plain text" toolbar button. I know for sure CKEditor/FCKEditor does.
you're right; TinyMCE does
you're right; TinyMCE does too -- that's what we have
but since we receive most of our content in Word and "paste as Word" is sometimes unpredictable, we find it more foolproof to filter the Word text with an offline text editor than converting in Word and using "paste as plain text"
sounds convoluted, but usually takes the same amount of time and is completely predictable -- for us, anyway; may just be that directly pasting in text that is truly plain, then formatting "with" the wysiwyg feels most like the direct editing in a text editor we're familiar with
You are not alone
A lot of times I'll copy Word text, paste it into Notepad to clean out any formatting, and then drop it into Drupal.
For longer documents Dreamweaver is great for converting Word text/tables into HTML markup. The things that screw up formatting for me most are empty paragraph tags
<p> </p>and just plain white space. I use Komodo Edit for coding and the View Whitespace feature helps too<Ctrl> + <shift> + 8.http://www.webbfx.net/
I'm not sure I understand.
I'm not sure I understand. The "paste as plain text" button strips out all formatting. It doesn't matter what you copy into it, it will remove all formatting.
we've found that to not
we've found that to not always be true with TinyMCE
issue is that "paste as plain" won't get all the Word formatting, and "paste as Word" can give unpredictable results that require cleaning up
so we just put it in plain and format from there; it's worth noting that we're rarely dealing with text so heavily formatted that we have to do much in the wysiwyg
Last Edited By
Hi Roy! On sites where there are multiple content managers/editors, having the "last edited by" user info is helpful. I think the only way to do this now is via PHP snippet (http://drupal.org/node/81242) however there may be a module I'm overlooking.
It's rare in my department when the node author is also the one who keeps that content up to date.
update: I'm talking about a pretty vanilla install, no Views.
http://www.webbfx.net/
Possible Answer
Maybe I'm missing something, but we have the 'Saved [date/time] by' displaying in our Revisions log because we have workflow in place. Do you have that to log who touched it last and when?
Doh!
Well, you learn something new every day. I frequently land on the main Content page which only shows the time when a node was last edited. I never thought to go into the Revision tab on the node itself to check. So yes, you are right, the info I need is there in the Revision tab. :)
The funny thing about inheriting a Drupal site is that you discover features you didn't know were there!
http://www.webbfx.net/
Search Results Display gobbeldy gook for PDFs sometimes
Is anyone use SOLR? I have a problem to solve. During our testing, we have our attachments in the results fine, but sometimes some PDFs display like this that I have in bold below. Has anyone experienced this before? Is it in the PDF or is it how SOLR is translating it? Google, with the same PDF, doesn't seem to have this problem. And if I use a different search term and the same PDF results, the weird characters aren't there.
3593-total-coliform-ruledistribution-system-federal-advisory-committee-comes-to-agreement.pdf
¤ÂC Óå3îl,²B < _Regualtory Watch2 SDWA Newsletter | HDR Total Coliform Rule/Distribution System Federal Advisory Committee Comes to Agreement The first step toward revision of the Total ... Rule/Distribution System Federal Advisory Committee (TCRDSAC) signed an Agreement in Principal (AIP) on Sept. 18, ...
application/pdf icon application/pdf attached to: "Total Coliform Rule/Distribution System Federal Advisory Committee Comes to Agreement"
Ignore this post of mine.
This wasn't the right place to post.
Right, but maybe I can help you sort it out...
A shot in the dark:
It looks like you have problems with the metadata of the item to which the PDF is attached. SOLR can't find a title and description in that item's metadata, so it's giving you its rendition of the contents of the page. (If this is the case, the gobbledygook might be an attempt to render some of the page code or an image as content.)
The more I think about it, the more plausible this seems, because SOLR is telling you:
If this wild but insightful (I hope) guess is right, you should:
That might make the problems you're seeing go away.
And, to answer a question that you might have, yes, it would be reasonable that Google and SOLR might operate differently enough for you to see two different results as you observe here.
Good luck! (And just where was the right place to ask this, anyway?)
Thanks, but this isn't the
Thanks, but this isn't the solution. When we get this resolved I'll share.
Do post as a separate discussion
Hi Michelle,
It would be great if you'd post this topic as a new discussion. Then come back here and link to it, so that we keep discussions to one topic. I'd like to know how it gets resolved, too.
Best, Marilyn
Screen shots would be helpful.
There's a wonderful community of drupalers to share code and ideas. However, when I see pages like this: http://drupal.org/node/81242 - it may be helpful to developers, but I'm wondering where the display of this information is supposed to render on an admin view or live on a page????. I'm visual like a lot of content managers. Screen shots of examples would help solve a lot of the questions I end up having - so is this a possibility or has this been tried and not successful?
Yes! It is 2011 and we are
Yes! It is 2011 and we are still limited to text for explaining complex and cumbersome issues? Adding screen shots would help immensely.
good idea
the problem i have with some of these mostly code pages is it can be difficult to fasten on the purpose quickly; i know i've read right over some stuff like this that probably addressed a problem i had, but without a standard summary statement of what the page was about, or some kind of visualization aid, i totally missed it
even a very general screen shot getting across the general idea would help
i think the programmers are very clear on the marks they're trying to hit, and those marks are obviously different from what site admins need to know, but a feature like this could facilitate site admins picking up more advanced knowledge more quickly, which could indirectly improve drupal adoption rates
Yes, we can use images
Michelle, if you click "Input format" below the comment form, you will see that you may add images to comments. You would have to first load the image to a Web server and then point the img tag to its url, but the image would appear in your comments.
The page you point to is part of Drupal's documentation. Images can be added there. Add a comment at the bottom of the page to ask for one. What you said here — "[This might] be helpful to developers, but I'm wondering where the display of this information is supposed to render on an admin view or live on a page?" — would be just fine.
It's great to have you participating in the Drupal community.
Thanks, but I should have
Thanks, but I should have been clear. I meant that it would be good for others who post code - a screen shot of examples would benefit users like me much more.
Thanks Marilyn for setting up
Thanks Marilyn for setting up this group! I'm pretty new to developing with Drupal, but I will check in and answer questions as I am able. On that note, I've been checking out screen casting software this week in preparation for making training videos for our clients. I'm going to be making a few practice videos I'm sure so if there's some fairly basic task that would be helpful to have as step by step video, I'm happy to take a shot at it.
Which software are you using?
@kronda Which screencasting software are you using? There's at least one free option for Windows I know of, but I find that nothing beats Camtasia as far as ease of use.
http://www.webbfx.net/
I'm using Screenflow which is
I'm using Screenflow which is also pretty awesome. Screenflow automatically has the ability to highlight keystrokes, which Camtasia seemed to be lacking.
time lag on content updates
i have noticed that blocks on panel pages and content in slideshows on panel pages doesn't always update right away when edited or added -- the same way as, say, edits to instances of simple content types
i gather that this is related to caching and can usually force the updates through by flushing caches -- need to do this or only i can see changes as admin when i need the content owners to see and check them
could anyone enlighten me as to what's actually going on timeframe-wise? does the delay depend on the caching rules in place on an individual site or is there something standard about how how soon updates -- to nodequeue content, for instance -- become published?
please respond here in
please respond here in separate thread:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/143534
Welcome to g.d.o!
Welcome to groups.drupal.org, web managers and content editors! It's great to see you here. I trust you will benefit from from being here and that Drupal itself will benefit from getting to listen in on your very important perspectives!
Here's a bit of introductory advice for those of you new to this space on how to use it effectively: Keep your conversations single-threaded. Each post (like this one) is created around a single topic; replies should pertain to it. If you want to start a new discussion, ask an unrelated question, or otherwise diverge, use the "Create Discussion" link at the top right and create your own, for several reasons:
:-)Those of you who've already posted divergent comments, if you hope for more attention on your issues, I recommend starting a new discussion and then replying to your comments on this thread with a link to the new page.
Again, welcome, all of you, to g.d.o. I hope you enjoy your stay!
:-DCan we make your comment sticky?
It might help to make your comment sticky at the top of this discussion, Travis, if possible.
Best, Marilyn
Thanks Travis, I'm thrilled to see the interest
Thanks Travis, I'm thrilled to see this group take off. I haven't led any other gdo groups, so I appreciate help from you and Roy and Dave, et al, to help keep us on track.
I agree it would be best for folks to add their questions in separate threads, so that each thread has a specific topic and is easier to search. That way we begin to build a reference list of topics to add wherever they should go, and we begin to see the pain points and how to solve as many as possible, to make Drupal better for content creators and administrators.
And do answer the three questions in the sticky thread at the top of the group, in comments. When we have enough comments to see patterns we'll want to add points/comments to the wiki itself, so that it informs both the documentation and support teams working to make both areas more useful to us all.
And please help me, as you already have, since I'm new to being an admin. Would appreciate any help on offer!
Best, Marilyn
Hi Marilyn, if it becomes
Hi Marilyn, if it becomes helpful, you can divide up the homepage into chunks, like these guys have done.
http://groups.drupal.org/code-review
It's managed in the Pages tag, e.g. http://groups.drupal.org/node/141119/og_panels
Contact me know if you need any help with that
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http://about.me/lisarex
Looks good, might need help in divvying up the blocks
Thanks, Lisa,
Do you have suggestions re how to divide the homepage? I can see that it might help, since we have several things going on at once. I would love some help!
Best, Marilyn
Use taxonomy for now?
No suggestions yet on home page layout; let's see what types of content appear.
In the meantime, the group can make use of taxonomy. The Docs group (http://groups.drupal.org/documentation-team) uses taxonomy to categorize content. That makes it a little easier to find what you're interested in.
==================================
http://about.me/lisarex
Content strategy
Hi, I'm lisarex and I'm leading the drupal.org content strategy... starting with a content audit. Content creation and management are important to so many people. Good content is the reason people come to sites, stay, and return!
Glad this group was started.
==================================
http://about.me/lisarex
Heard a great presentation by FCC re their new Drupal site
Since you mention content strategy and the content audit of drupal.org, I'd like to mention beta.fcc.org (soft launch, scheduled to become fcc.org in a few weeks). I went to the Drupal4Gov code/docs sprint and heard the presentation re the FCC site. It was intriguing to say the least. They felt they had much too much information, wanted to simplify navigation, encourage people to use search and a few other ideas.
They decided to take much of the content out of navigation and create an encyclopedia (set up like a glossary, with alphabetical listings) since they had so much content. I immediately thought about the d.o universe with so much content, so many subdomains,etc. I'd love to hear your thoughts on their solution (in Drupal), if you have a moment to take a look at the site.
Best, Marilyn
http://beta.fcc.gov/
I heard about http://beta.fcc.gov; that's interesting to hear that was their approach. YOu say the "felt" it had too much information in the navigation; how did they arrive at that conclusion?
Anyway, that is exciting that they will go to full launch soon!
==================================
http://about.me/lisarex
Governance and ownership issues
The presentation was short, so I hope I'm restating accurately: Content owners wanted to hold on to older content, for historical reasons (to see the advancement of topics in historical context, I believe).
The goal was to keep the historical data in a way that it would be findable, while at the same time allowing people to see current work, initiatives, features, at the top levels on the site.
New Main Nav: the FCC, Our Work, Tools and Data, Business and Legal. Easy for general interest visitors to decide which to select.
They made the Search box large and centered, so it can't be missed. And added a Take Action bar next to Search on the right, encouraging feedback (including Complaints).
Homepage has an image rotator, with links for more information.
As you can see, there are still lots of choices to make. Our Work has a Topics Browser (I'd call it subnav) with a grid format on the landing page (other sections may have it in right sidebar). Columns: Major topic, category, topic. You choose a major topic, then category. When you click a category you get a list of topics to choose from. I like it, though it takes a fair amount of space (which is why it lives in the sidebar on other pages, I believe).
After that I would be lost if I hadn't found the topic of choice. That's why they made search very visible. They expect people to search for very specific info that doesn't show up as a topic, feature, etc.
Interestingly, if you choose the FCC in main nav, the landing page is the Newsoom, though there is a dropdown that takes you to other pages.
I like it, partly due to the visual design, I think, and the idea of the encyclopedia for information that doesn't fit at higher levels. I do wonder if it's new features (like the topics grid nav) will be harder for general public visitors to use. At the same time, if you know how to use search, it should be easy to find anything on the site, quickly and efficiently.
Best, Marilyn
They've also done usability testing!
The FCC also did usability testing on this interface through the General Services Administration's First Fridays program. I don't think the beta site we're seeing right now reflects any of the changes from that test; I think it is what they tested.
One morning, three participants each ran through a set of tasks on the beta site -- finding information, getting a license, various tasks that made sense for different audiences of the FCC. Each participant gave an hour of their time, which allowed for not just testing the site but also answering questions from observers, who were observing from another room through GoToMeeting (my "other room" was 1500 miles away). Those questions were after they finished the tasks; generally, we took them back to a place in the test and asked questions about their mindset, comprehension of the page, and so forth.
After the three tests were complete, the observers met (over lunch, I think; the caterer missed my room -- lol) and did a KJ exercise to come up with problems and potential solutions. An hour later, the folks from the FCC left with a sense of how usable their design was, what changes, if made, would make the greatest improvement to it, and what changes would improve the site and would be relatively easy to make.
A number of the participants had problems understanding some of the terms. So the folks at the FCC can figure out what terms might work better -- they got a few suggestions from the participants; they can review the search terms used on their site to get more ideas -- and make a few small changes that might help significantly.
For all three participants, the way rotating images dominated the page made it hard for them to find any of the links they needed to complete their tasks. Like an ottoman in a doorway, it gave them an obstacle to get around to do what they came there to do. As serious as that problem was for the participants in this test, the folks at the FCC will have to figure out whether they can find a fix that will fly with their management, can be done in the time available before their planned full release, and won't create new problems that are even worse than the one they're trying to solve.
But at least they know that the problem is a real one faced by typical visitors to their site, not a proverbial windmill they are being compelled to joust.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Old nav normal for the time it was created
Sorry I didn't answer that directly in my first response.
See the old site, http://www.fcc.gov/ until it's retired in a week or so. You'll immediately see the reason they felt the older navigation didn't work.
Going with four main nav tabs serves to group information more logically. The added encyclopedia allows for content that doesn't fit the hierarchy, but is wanted by content "owners".
Best, Marilyn
The beta site is beautiful!
The beta site is beautiful! So clean and organized well - as far as I can tell. My question for this one is - how did you choose the order of your drop-downs? They aren't alpha order. Does the user have any issues finding information again when they return because of this?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Before you get too enamored with the design, check out the comments in the FCC's forum for feedback about the beta site.
Major props to the FCC for setting up the forum in the first place, but by far the nature of the feedback is, "Don't entertain us, serve us."
Do you have the name/contacts
Do you have the name/contacts for the folks on the FCC's Web team? I'd like to know who designed the site and what process they used.
Thank you!
Hilary Marsh
Gray Brooks
He'll also be speaking at http://opengovdc.com/ in June
Just a minor kind of drupal geeky girl and for the US government no less!
very usefull for me
thanks for share
Thank you!
This is exactly the type of group I've been looking for!
Almost two months ago, at the end of DrupalCon Chicago, I wrote a blog post about looking for a community: http://goingtodrupalcon.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/my-quixotic-quest-for-a...
And this week, it's the subject of our Twin Cities Drupal User Group meeting: http://groups.drupal.org/node/137304