Local Drupal developers and users gathered at OJC Technologies on Friday, August 19, to discuss the increasing adoption of Drupal 7 and ways to increase development efficiency. More than 16 people — including representatives from OJC, Wolfram, Surface 51, U of I College of Education, the News-Gazette, Riverbed and the Urbana Free Library — gathered for the Central Illinois Drupal Meet-Up, which will be held every month in Champaign-Urbana.
Drupal 7 vs. 6
After introductions were made, the conversation quickly turned to a top-down discussion of Drupal: why we use it, which version of Drupal we prefer, and what alternatives we also consider when launching a new site. Lori Patterson, Brandon Bowersox and Matt Towonsend shared OJC's methodology for platform selection and why we've started leaning towards Drupal 7 for many clients. From our point of view, new users should embrace Drupal 7 unless they require a specific feature in Drupal 6 or contributed modules.
John Reed of the News-Gazette, which runs more than a dozen Drupal 6 sites, pointed out something we've found with several of our clients: any company sufficiently invested in Drupal 6 should be very careful about deploying Drupal 7 sites, as maintenance and knowledge costs all increase.
Drupal vs. Wordpress
For those at the meeting who were pondering a move to Drupal as a developer or client, we discussed the practical applications of Drupal versus WordPress and other platforms. Lori mentioned that OJC recommends WordPress to many clients, especially those with lighter data and structural demands. The key is figuring out just what you need from your site, how content will be related, and how you expect the site to grow — decisions critical for the timely roll-out of a strong site. John Barclay of the College of Education added that modular decisions in Drupal are just as important as the platform itself, concluding that planning and forethought are necessary at every point in the development process.
Features Module
After this somewhat philosophical conversation, we discussed more technical aspects of Drupal, especially ways to leverage completed work to streamline the development process. Matt Sharkey of Dizzy Giant shared how his firm uses Profiles to help meet clients' needs — since many of his clients require similar feature sets, he tends to roll out sites with those features predefined in a Profile.
Matt Townsend spoke at length about the Features module in Drupal 7. This is OJC's preferred way of deploying work across multiple websites. Features takes things you've done in the Drupal interface — creating views, content types, roles, etc. — and codifies them into a custom module that you can install across multiple sites and place into version control. In other words, if you've made a super-cool photo gallery on one site and need to use it on another, you can use Features to quickly replicate your work on the new site. This process has been instrumental on several OJC projects, including our migration work for the American Library Association, where entire sites are built, configured and populated automatically. The Features module is crucial for making sure each site has every component it needs upon installation.
Next Meeting: Stay Tuned
This Drupal Meet-Up offered two hours of lively conversation about not only the latest trends in Drupal but the latest local trends in Drupal. Meet-ups are an excellent opportunity to learn how your neighbors in Champaign-Urbana are using Drupal, to meet people thinking about a switch to Drupal, and to jump in on the action yourself.
Possible topics discussed for our next meet-up include: Views, Services & Mobile Apps, Context, Panels, Theming, Module Development in 6 versus 7, Drush, developer best practices, and other favorite modules. We hope that you can make it to the next meeting — it'll be a fun one!