Managing many closely related websites, or sites subdivided in a plurality of rich, self-affirming sections, is a complex problem. Whether it’s a company with multiple departments or a newspaper with content curated for different regions, this issue has powerful implications at the content architecture, design and development levels.
Typical solutions in Drupal have been threefold: domain access module; multisite configuration; organic groups. Combinatory solutions are also possible. All bring advantages but also considerable caveats.
At OpenMedia, we recently faced this issue. Due to the specific requirements of the content architecture conceived by our team, none of the proven solutions seemed to fit quite right and the trade-offs were concerning. What we ended up coming up with won’t fit every use case and is not necessarily a “best way” but is definitely an alternative that worked for us and that might be useful to others. It leverages Drupal’s powerful taxonomy, ctools contexts, panels and views to organize sectorial content in a way that is flexible, performant, SEO compliant and easily maintainable without compromising the ability to use most of the resources normally made available by Drupal to any other type of website.
In this presentation we’ll go over some of the main challenges a multi-headed website poses, namely: navigation; url composition; node filtering; recreation of taxonomy and listing pages and proper filtering of their content; and caching. In the example that we’ll analyse, we’ll see how a region value stored by a cookie is passed to panels as a context variable which then trickles down to inform how menus should be built, urls composed and content filtered by both panels and views. We’ll also look at how Drupal cache can be leveraged in such a configuration and how http accelerators, like Varnish, can be persuaded to cache the resulting answers to the user selections.
About the presenter:
Roberto Gorjão
Roberto is the Web Manager at OpenMedia. Originally from Portugal, he is formally trained as a Graphic Designer and as a Teacher. He has more than a decade of web development experience, both front and back-end, having worked for organizations in Portugal, the U.S. and Canada. The love of programming pervades his personal life and he and his seven year old daughter bond over building automated electronic gadgets and coding with Scratch.
Social
Please join us for drinks and food at Steamworks Brewery. This is a great opportunity to meet other Drupalers in the area and network.
Lightning Talks
Attendees are invited to share their experience by giving a 2 to 4 minute presentation on any topic of interest to the Drupal community. If you want to use a laptop to show a website or control panel please be sure you have the necessary cable (VGA) to connect to an overhead projector.