Drupal in Use at Duke

Duke Web ServicesOffice of Information Technology

• duke.edu• pratt.duke.edu• divinity.duke.edu• today.duke.edu• medicine.duke.edu• nursing.duke.edu• studentaffairs.duke.edu• law.duke.edu• mclibrary.duke.edu• chapel.duke.edu

Our use of Drupal

• Late 2008: our first Drupal 6 site• October 2009: duke.edu• November 2011: our first Drupal 7 site

Drupal 7 Upgrade Overview

Initial assessment

Exploratory run

Research / troubleshoot / adjustments

Practice runSchedule

upgrade for production

Drupal Theme Best Practices

1. Always use a child theme (or sub-theme)2. See #13. .tpl files are for markup, not logic

1. Make use of pre-process functions4. Don’t go crazy with contributed modules.5. Use Drupal’s Methods to add css/javascript to your

theme1. E.G. conditional stylesheets

1. drupal_add_css(path_to_theme() . '/css/ie7.css', array('group' => CSS_THEME, 'browsers' => array('IE' => 'IE 7', '!IE' => FALSE), 'preprocess' => FALSE));

How Easy is creating a child theme?

Copy files to sites/all/themes

Edit the .info file

Ready for Customization

Which Parent theme do I choose??????

• What does your site need to do?– Be responsive?– Conform to ‘the grid’?– Change layout/colorization/look-and-feel based on

context?– Does it need to be accessible?– Other special aspects?

Some Starter Themes to Consider• Omega

– We use it. Tons of regions, and fine grained layout control from UI, and uses grid system. It’s very responsive, though it uses a layered-onion approach to responsive styles.

• Boilerplate– HTML5 output. Fixed layout. Very semantic.

• Genesis – Very flexible framework. Fixed or fluid layouts. Uses grid system.

• Fusion– also has many configurations from the UI. Uses grid system

• Zen– Trusty and widespread. Very good community support. Very handy

starter themes.

Other important Theme questions

• Who is going to work on the theme?– A team?– An individual?– Your nephew?

• Who will maintain the theme?• How will you handle versioning and delivery?– Git?– Svn?– Printed copies?

Resources

• Delivering Drupal - http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/delivering-drupal

• Drupal Contributed Themes - http://drupal.org/project/themes

• Drupal API - http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal• Drupal & GIT - http://drupal.org/node/803746

Projects: Installation profile

• Create common default roles and permissions• Configure Shibboleth• Install commonly used modules• Set recommended site options• Optional development set-up

Projects: Duke Events module

• Provides default content type with fields set up for Duke Events information

• Provides several default views for events

Projects: Duke Feeds module

• Preconfigured parsers• Currently supports Events@Duke– Maps information coming out of Events@Duke to

fields with no extra set-up• Next step: additional information formats– Scholars@Duke– Faculty Database System (FDS)

Project: Google Custom Search module

• Provides integration of Google Custom Search into Drupal

• Provides default styles for more detailed customization if needed

Project: Attachments module

• Straight-forward way to handle attached documents (PDF, Word, etc)

• Tagging and access control• User-friendly• Database-friendly

Project: Drupal 7 Upgrade Assistant

• Generates module/theme status report• What do you need to upgrade to latest version

of D6?• What are you using that has no stable release

for D7?

Next Project

?

Resources at Duke

• training.oit.duke.edu/lynda• oit-dws@duke.edu• The person next to you• Future gatherings, email list, etc?