I have been enjoying the group posts, please keep them coming! I especially liked the recent posts about Drupal certification, which in turn lead me to learning about Drupalize.me and Lullabot. It is always nice to see successful companies using Drupal.
Recently, I was tasked to build a simple Intranet for a local municipality. I was told the user community is not technically savvy, but I still decided to use my favorite CMS, Drupal, to handle the user and content management aspects of the site. Specifically, I choose the OpenPublic distribution of Drupal and their OpenOmega sub theme (Omega 3 base theme).
I am in the early stages of development, and still trying to figure out how to approach the various departments like HR about this new information sharing tool at their disposal. I am wrestling with the balance between all the functionality Drupal offers with the simplicity of what they want for an Intranet. I am currently looking to build custom content types with supporting node, page, and view templates to meet their functional and aesthetic needs.
In a perfect world, I'd love for departments to add content themselves, but in the beginning at least, I am afraid it is all going to bottle neck through me. If anyone has any experience they would like to share with implementing an organizational Intranet I would love to hear them.
Comments
requirements gathering
Good evening Buddymaguire,
I can empathize with how complex the early stages of a project can feel. If you have the time, maybe you can approach those initial meetings trying to understand what those departments, like HR, need in order to accomplish their tasks. By working to understand how those departments work, it might reduce the technical intimidation they might feel (as well as build "buy in"). Then you can work on constructing the best content types (and how they feed various parts of the website, etc.) that fulfill that need.
The nice thing is you can work to build an interface for content providers that guides them through the process. One thing I've found is that WYSIWYG editors can be great - but they can convolute the process too. In my ideal world the content type would be explicit enough that a WYSIWYG editor would essentially be unneeded. The parts of the content type would be "chunked" out into fields, taxonomies, entity references, etc. and the content provider can just put in their content in the right spots as plain text.
Karen McGrane - I've found her content strategy approach inspiring http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/karen-mcgrane-9134445
To help build content types - you might want to try Palantirs spreadsheet, it might be overkill, so use as needed. http://www.palantir.net/blog/developing-drupal-sites-plan-or-perish
It sounds like a fascinating project!
Good Resources
Just a note to say that I'm reading and appreciating these posts too. Planatir.net looks like a good resource. Meredith, are there any Drupal-specific blogs that you make it a point to check regularly? Thanks!
I highly encourage to
I highly encourage to subscribe to this weekly newsletter where you get lots of info
http://www.theweeklydrop.com/archive
And I read this blog on a regular basis.
https://www.lullabot.com/taxonomy/term/489
http://www.webomelette.com/
http://atendesigngroup.com/blog
http://webwash.net/videos
http://www.phase2technology.com/blog-list/
http://codekarate.com/
http://www.metaltoad.com/blog
https://www.ostraining.com/blog/drupal/
https://www.lullabot.com/blog
http://palantir.net/blog
http://getlevelten.com/blog
http://evolvingweb.ca/blog
Thanks for posting these resources
These are some good resources, thank you for posting them. I will be checking them out regularly. Have you ever worked with paid training Drupal sites? I've heard good things about Build A Module and Drupalize.me.
Brett