One of the things that came out of DrupalCon Barcelona was that as part of marketing, we need to start getting better at asking everyone that builds Drupal projects to contribute back case studies. Luckily, case studies are in everyone's best interest, from the developer to the client and Drupal itself.
Wim Janin started off this process by emailing me the case study template below. Please edit/update directly, or add comments below (I've turned on comments for this wiki post).
One of the things we discussed was turning this into a CCK content type, making it easy to sort by industry and in general make sure we get all the information for each case study in a structured way. I may get permission from Moshe to experiment with a CCK content type here, but that's a step two.
Drupal success cases
Q: What have agencies/developers built using Drupal for what type of customers?
A: list of fields :-)
Customer
- Name:
- URL this project:
- URL customer (if different):
- Industry tag(s)
- size (employees):
- size (revenue):
Implementation partner(s)
- Name company:
- URL company:
- contact person:
- contact means (tel, e-mail, skype etc)
Project
- Challenge (strategically/functional)
- Project Tag(s)
- Solution (functional high-level)
- Architecture (technical high-level, also measures to cope with high-volume)
- Drupal core version
- Used modules
- Own modules
- extra stuff
- integrations (Omniture, ad services, external databases, etc.)
- Hardware
- Financial size of project (BM: I suggest a range -- under 10K, 10K - 50K, 50K - 100K, etc. etc.)
Realisation
- elapsed time
- mandates realized
- release date
- screen shots (2) as whatever (image, file) attachments
Usage of site
- daily/monthly volumes users
- daily/monthly hit volume
Attachments
- some pdf docs with more stuff
- pdf with a nice layout to present all of the above in clean layout
Comments
Contact with drupalsites?
Boris, should we make contact with drupalsites.net?
They already have a massive (>1.600) db of Drupal cases.
If we could join, we could enable these extra fields to add a layer of filters on top of the now very flat pool of nodes.
Interesting
Good idea, Wim. It's been a while since I visited that site. It's a lot more professional now. I have a tendency to not trust external efforts, especially when I don't know who the heck they are and don't know if any "community" members are behind it.
What might be interesting is to "bless" ds.net as the "official" place of Drupal sites / case studies...this would have to come from the Association. We are looking at something similar with the themes garden.
Wim -- can you contact them and report back to us?
last time i thought about
last time i thought about this i wanted to build a module that folks deploy on their site which collected and displayed this. so folks could just request a aknown url on a drupal site and hopefully see this module's data all filled in. i futher thought that the module could have phone home feature like drupal.module where it sens the case studies to a server. something to consider.
Less about modules
The modules part is the least interesting part. This is developers and marketing teams writing up a great description of how/why they built a site. Kind of like your Observer write up, Moshe.
Type of project
I suppose the cost of the project covers this in a way, but I think you might also benefit from having information on:
Type of project e.g. personal website, non-profit charity/NGO, commercial solution
It would also be good to try to put the 'challenges' in a sector e.g.
newspaper
collaborative book/journal writing
sales
government/local authorities
education
I'm trying to get info on writing collaborative manuals/handbooks/textbooks and it would be great to be able to see all the case studies sorted in one place, so this is definitely a good initiative.
Good example of case study
CalArts -- http://www.designguru.org/projects/nonprofit--educational/california-ins...
Updated link
For anyone looking for our Case Study about creating http://calarts.edu using Drupal, here's the new URL:
http://designguru.org/client-projects/california-institute-arts-calarts
q./
Qasim Virjee
Principal at designguru.org
http://designguru.org
qasim@designguru.org
1.416.777-1864
I actually kind of like
I actually kind of like Moshe's idea of having a module that has these questions and some more "essay style" fields so that a site developer or maintainer could possibly update their "case study" over time. It seems like that model might be far more sustainable than having site developers submit a node to a 3rd party site that they perhaps can or can't update over time.
though, if there were a site out there (drupal sites) where i could easily submit case studies, edit them, keep them up to date, and then aggregate my case studies on another site (like my own site) that would be cool too.
I think the big thing for me is that i do not want to have to maintain the same case study in multiple places. I would rather maintain it in a place that i control completely and have it aggregated into some other place (drupal.org or drupalsites for example).
So maybe the module has two branches of features:
1) a basic case study of the site that is hosting the module (a node with certain fields)
2) case studies of other sites (each a node with certain fields)
the feed of these nodes can be aggregated by d.o or some other site "automatically" through phone home, or grabbed and aggregated manually if desired.
The reason for my suggestion is that i imagine any site designer would want to host, or feature case studies that they write about sites they developed on their own site, not solely on a 3rd party sites, and not in two places at once (While trying to keep edits in sync)
http://www.CivicActions.com
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
http://GregoryHeller.com
How about awards for motivation?
I like the idea of case studies a lot. It would have helped me during the period we were searching for a new CMS for our site www.customerthink.com, in 2006. Examples speak loudly...
Case studies are extremely valuable to our site, too, to show how companies have implemented a "customer-centric business strategy." But we've concluded that busy people probably aren't going to contribute them unless properly motivated. So we're working on an online process (using Drupal, natch), to enable users to submit their case for consideration in an annual awards program.
Submission will be a new CCK content type with fields to describe their project, what they did, business results, etc. Kind of like interviewing them via the web. Then the ratings will be done online too, by a panel of judges using NodeReview, to determine finalists for awards in different categories. Selecting the winners may be done by community votes (e.g. FiveStar), judges, or both.
I think if you did something similar in the few months before a DrupalCon, you'd get a lot of submissions. Give some awards at a conference, and it will also boost attendance.
Not that people won't do things for the "great good" of Drupal, but a little encouragement won't hurt! I'm proud of what we've accomplished in less than a year after our launch of CustomerThink redesign using Drupal. Since February this year, the number of monthly users and page views has doubled, and our user satisfaction has also increased. It would be fun to submit our site as a case study and see how it stacks up with the other great Drupal sites out there.
Bob Thompson
CustomerThink Corp.
Bob Thompson
CustomerThink Corp.
Moveable type case studies
Here are some examples of Moveable type case studies. http://www.movabletype.com/solutions/case-studies.html
Nice simple one page case study with a brand name in a particular industry: http://www.movabletype.com/solutions/general-motors-case-study.html
Kieran
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield
New Drupal career! Drupal profile builders.
Try pre-configured and updatable profiles on CivicSpaceOnDemand
+1 on making it cck
Great idea! Making it cck will facilitate contributions. Our company can contribute to the case studies!
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Plone case studies and showcase
Plone has a clean, searchable, sortable format for case studies, site showcase, service providers, and media links. Here are a few examples:
Being able to aggregate and/or easily submit (something like this? - http://sharethis.com/) a well presented/formated showcase on an external site, should open up a ton of opportunites to showcase Drupal.
In terms of helping with this type of project, the GHOP contest has been on fire (http://groups.drupal.org/ghop-2007) - Drupal Dojo is going to ramp up it's efforts to work on important Drupal projects/products, and provide an outlet to market/showcase Drupal and the community. If you have any ideas on how that Dojo can add value, please leave them here -
http://groups.drupal.org/node/7705
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Gus Austin
I'd like to submit a case study
Buts its not clear where and how I should submit it!
Moveable case studies
This is the best option for moveable case studies http://www.movabletype.com/solutions/case-studies.html it's fairly straight forward and easy to use.
Interestingly we moved away from Drupal when building https://www.tankpr.co.uk/ because there was an easier option in Wordpress.