 All right, while we're getting started here, just I'm curious. Raise your hand if you're here from a university or a school. Whoa. Look at that. Awesome. All right, wait. Raise your hand if you're from a university or school and you use Drupal. Yeah, all right. Well, welcome everybody. And I have the pleasure of welcoming you to DrupalCon New Orleans as a local. I live in Baton Rouge. As evidence proof that I'm truly a local, there's my man Murray. He's wearing his Mardi Gras beads at the crew of Mutts Parade in Baton Rouge. Just to check the technology, here's a gratuitous shot of Murray as a puppy. All right, it's working. Puppies. Cool. So I also work with the Louisiana Drupal User Group. We organize Drupal Camp New Orleans. Keep an eye out. We will hopefully have another one this fall. We didn't do one this spring because we had this event. If you are nearby, we meet the first Thursday of every month here at Launchpad. You're welcome to join us. I'm Jeff. Nice to meet you guys. Thanks for coming today. I work at Media Current. I'm in charge of our professional services, the work we do for our clients. I also help manage our work with LSU up in Baton Rouge. In part because I live right down the street, and I'm also a proud alum. We've got the backpack right over there with the logo on it, right? The Arkansas fans on our team would probably say I'm a little too proud. I'm here representing the work of a great team. I'm not going to talk a lot about coding things. They did all the heavy lifting and work, so I wanted to acknowledge some of the great things that they did here. The platform they've built helps me to sit down with the client every Wednesday, go meet with my friend there. Together, we can solve most of the needs for unique content without having to go back and code things at this point on this platform. As the team will attest, keeping me out of code is a good idea. About Media Current, Media Current is focused on creating Drupal websites that accomplish business and brand objectives for organizations. We're a single source partner to provide turnkey solutions and services, development design, strategy support, maintenance testing, whatever you need in Drupal. Here's several of the schools we've worked with, and as you guys all attest, raising your hands, there's a lot of university interest and usage of Drupal. I think one statistic that AQUIA has put out, 71 of the top 100 universities use Drupal in some way. There's definitely a lot to talk about, a lot of usage of Drupal in the higher ed space. For our session today, we'll talk about the site and the project and the client. Again, that I work with at LSU. Talk about some of the challenges we've reigned into and challenges of university projects in general. Though I guess I probably don't have to cover that with y'all. You probably live it every day, right? We'll go through some of the solutions we've provided, and then I do want to leave some time and share some lessons learned from building and supporting site over the years now. And it's a Drupal 7 platform that I'll be talking about, but I do want to cover some of the things that we've already seen or we know are coming in Drupal 8 that we think would have helped. Like if we had only had that back then, right? Some of the fun stuff Dries showed in his keynote, for sure. Some things I won't cover, I'm not going to, intending to talk about the design of the site. It's a bit dated at this point, and that's okay. But not intending for a site review in terms of design or the custom coding. I wanted to suggest this session for the site building track because that's what I really want to talk a lot about is just empowering people to just use Drupal without having to go to the custom coding to solve some of these problems. And I'm hopefully not here to give you guys a media current sales pitch. Be happy to work with any of you, but I'm going to show you some trouble that we've had and how we work through it and things like that as well. Again, the site's been in production for a number of years now, and so we've got some learnings of how it's been used versus what we thought it was going to be. So first, about the site and project. So the specific division and apartment that we work with at LSU is Student Life and Enrollment. So we're not talking about the main lsu.edu site. It's on a different platform, but this is a division that had originally developed their own site, a homegrown solution on Drupal 6, and they did it as a multi-site installation. We came in, helped move it to Drupal 7, update the design, things like that. Cover your eyes, there's some bright colors coming. Here's a before shot. These are some of the departments as they were on Drupal 6. Some of the challenges they had on this platform, it had grown to an unmanageable state. Each department had unique content types within the multi-site. Security releases meant, according to 15 plus deployments, and it needed a design refresh, as you can see, probably. But we can all play the archive.org game and pull up things from our past. So I was the webmaster for Major League Soccer, back in the times when there was such a title as Webmaster. And I think this beauty was built with Microsoft Front Page. Again, keep me out of the code. Putting aside comments about the old design, the platform is for a really nice group of people that work hard for students at LSU. Helping them succeed, bringing the best ones to campus, helping them succeed while they're there, helping them find employment when they graduate. LSU ranks 33rd out of more than 160 research schools for mid-career earnings. That's higher than Alabama, Florida, UNC. You know what? I'm not going to keep going again, that pride thing, right? Again, the student life and enrollment. So some of the departments on the platform that are on Drupal here on campus, their career center, again, helping to place people in careers academic success, which offers all the resources and tools. Students need extra help in an area, need access to tutoring, supplemental instruction, things like that. There's lots of programs, and probably not unique tells you. They like to name programs after the math's gotten some way. So you've got Stripes and PAWS and all that kind of tiger stuff in there for some of the initiatives. And you see Dean of Students and Greek Life. So that's a nice mix for one platform, right? You've got the Dean and Mr. Belushi and others. That's one of the challenges that I want to talk about is the, and I think it is maybe unique to universities, all the different people in the audience that the CMS has to serve, both the website and the people publishing into it, right? The Dean has to get his message out. The students have different needs than the Dean, right? Anybody surprised? You want to debate this, right? Some of the challenges, right? University procurement and purchasing regulations can be a lengthy and restrictive process. Okay, that's maybe a challenge for us on the agency side, but probably for y'all too, right? Trying to get help with your project where you need it and all the things you have to do to justify it. The wide-ranging audience like I talked about, I think it's hard when you have to serve so many constituents with this system to find the right voice for any piece of content and who it's focused for. And then on the other side of it, the administrative side. So using the CMS, and you guys can probably relate, but one challenge that LSU has, the back-end system and how to publish the thing, it's controlled by student workers a lot in some of these departments, and they're gone after a semester or two, and then you got to start the cycle all over again, right? So all kinds of fun challenges. Duplication is another interesting one. Duplication across campus, right? This is anecdotal, but I've read that for much of its history, LSU had three different separate delivery systems for on-campus mail, just to get your mail from one part of the campus together. Doesn't sound right. Here, duplication. A logo, right? It's LSU. One brand, everybody's working together. This took me about five minutes to find all these instances of the different logos that are in use. I like some better than others, but if we can't agree on the logo, imagine how this goes down to the content and the departments and what message we're trying to get out there on any given site, right? But I don't want to pick on LSU the whole time. We're in SEC country. We like to pick on the big 10 down here. Sorry if anybody's from Ohio State, if I'm bringing up old memories here. Here's a sample page. Again, I don't know anything about Ohio State or their mission or the goals of this admissions page. This could serve them very well, right? But just kind of looking at this, and I just chose this one for no particular reason other than picking on the big 10, right? Ohio State's a big place, and the message this page gives, you want to apply to us, figure out our systems, find your way, you come and give your stuff to us, right? Now, maybe Ohio State has more applicants since they know what to do with, and it's okay that it's a little bit of a, find your way kind of thing, right? But this is, to me, speaking to some of the challenges with the audience. Who are you publishing this content for? Are you publishing it for the admissions person or the prospective student that needs to use the admissions page? Those are two different goals. An example I can give somewhere we have worked with is Butler. So we worked on Butler's site at Media Current, and the project included a lot of content and digital strategy, so not only just building Drupal to output the website, but really focusing on the goals and the strategy and the messaging that they wanted to convey, doing user research and personas to help uncover what questions does the person that's using this site and reading it, what do they have? What questions do we need to answer on these pages? So this is Butler's admissions page, and the first thing it tries to do is answer the questions that most commonly come out for that, again, prospective student that is comparing schools and considering applying. Am I going to get a job after I graduate? That was the number one that we found. So that first number up there, 95%, that's a great story Butler has to tell. 95% of you that graduate wind up in a job. That's pretty good, right? So that's an example of just the strategy and the results that came out of it and kind of focusing on serving that audience and answering their questions. Butler, as you see here, saw some good numbers, increase in keyword rankings for keywords that I think work well for that university, referral, traffic, bounce rate, all good signs that the investment was worth it. And that's kind of a question to ask or to ask those of your procurement offices, how's your site viewed? Is it an expense? We have to have a website so let's put some stuff on it or is it an investment, right? What are we going to get out of it? Do any of these things sound familiar, right? Having trouble showing the ROI of the site, tracking before and after results, again, is the mindset that this site that we have to have is an expense or are we investing in it? Is there a challenge with leadership buy-in? Understanding, truly understanding the level of effort it takes to create a world-class digital experience. How is it with governance or structure of the platform? Do different departments have autonomy to do whatever they want and create that multi-site monster I was referring to earlier? These are all important challenges to think about. With some important results, right? So if the site's hard to maintain and hard to keep up to date security-wise, you don't want to wind up in the headlines on the side of the screen here with security concerns, right? If it's too hard to make a deployment. Luckily, Drupal's here to help, right? There's plenty of free tools from the community to help build your site and solve these challenges, right? Does anybody want to hear about how WordPress though failed on the LSU campus? Not failed, it is struggling. So my point is, and we'll get into this here in a second, but most any system is technically capable, right? We're here, we like Drupal. WordPress is just fine too. It's how it's configured that can determine its success or failure. Choices that are made along the way as it's being set up. Sometimes very small, seemingly small choices can have a big difference. We'll show you some examples. So one suggestion before we're going to pick and choose the modules in these free tools to build your site. We often see universities writing detailed technical requirements about a system before considering what system will be used. The result of that is you wind up spending an inordinate amount of your time working against that system because before we even thought, hey, we're going to put it on Drupal. We know some readily available tools to use. We're going to write this requirement that thing must look like and work like this, right? Consider the system that it's going to live on to make the best choices and leverage what all of these wonderful people here provide that you can use. So let's talk about WordPress on LSU's campus, just as an example. This is a department site that's on WordPress. WordPress, right? Easy to use for content administrators. Why is it struggling? LSU is moving away from using any WordPress. Why? Let me show you a small thing. Look at the URL. It didn't have to be there, right? That's a choice somebody made in configuring the WordPress installation to give, I don't even know what that is, Site-01? That'll help with SEO, won't it? Simple things, right? These are things that were absent by choice. Somebody just decided, meh, the friendly URL patterns, vanity URLs meeting. I've got maybe a printed handout that I want to give out on campus to steer people to my website. Someone at lsu.edu slash myawesomething, right? Not a great ability to do that or do that in an easy way. Access to tools to help show that return and manage the site and make sure it's doing well and serving what it needs. Restricted. Can't get into our Google Analytics. Steven, no, right? Those are choices, right? And the challenges that can lead to a failure of a system on a campus is to take too many of these choices and controls, put them into the hands of a limited group that will always have that ready-made excuse to be too busy, right? Give those tools to the people that need them, let them work with them. So let's go through some examples of that, right? Giving control and options to the people that need to operate the system. Here is a screenshot. Again, we're not looking at the design. Background imagery was a big thing back, you know, I think we moved away from it, but that was a big thing when it was designed. Friendly URL, right? Seems simple, but, you know, the choice. But we went a little further than that, right, to kind of make things match. And this is, you know, just took a little of extra effort, but in our minds was worth it. You know, if you look at... Here's the menu system setup. So primary, secondary menu items match that URL path in terms of where you're at in the site. And so do the breadcrumbs, right? So just simple little things, you know, maybe not important to everybody, but, you know, making lots of small decisions like this along the way to make the system make sense and help with things like SEO, we believe, you know, in some of the structure decisions. Path Auto and Drupal is a great tool to do things like this, right? So taking a few minutes during the build phase to think through the patterns and putting something in place that's logical and is going to follow that structure, you know, so if you're not familiar with the Path Auto module in Drupal, it's one that's commonly used, right? But then put it in, but then think through how to configure for each content type. I'm going to publish this and what structure do I want to put it in, right? Make it friendly and have a good logical pattern that can scale and grow as the site grows. So another thing that we use for this platform, I talked about the multi-site on Drupal 6, we turned it into one site on Drupal 7 with an organic groups installation for the control and access on a per department basis. We've got, you know, 15-plus departments all running in here. So there's a content type for each department, which creates, you know, the node or the homepage for that department and then all of their content that they generate and the permissions for the editors within each department is controlled by that organic groups access. Then taking it a step further, I talked about those vanity URLs. So the concern was, well, we're on students.lsu.edu and now we need to promote My Awesome Event. Well, what if three different departments have My Awesome Event and they all want that vanity URL? Let them in to that control, right? And have that option to create those URLs. Get some feedback. You know, trampling on one another, having that duplication. Wait, you can't have My Awesome Event. My event's awesome, right? This is some contrib module. It's a sandbox, I think, still, but, you know, we went ahead and put it out there within organic groups. So I can only create that vanity URL within the group that I'm a member of, right? It's going to automatically put that part in the path and then I can put the rest in. So, you know, small thing, pretty handy, overcame that concern of there's a lot of us here. I don't want them messing up my stuff and what I use, right? And look, I was speaking of the organic groups and the department nodes. So here's an example of two department homepages. Again, these are department nodes. You see, they have a same general structure, but there is some variety within it. Design-wise, we can debate, but a couple of the controls that we gave to make the departments unique but still fit in a common platform. We've got dynamic backgrounds doing the different background imagery and that'll carry through the group and all of its content. Again, background is where the thing when this design was executed. And then within the content, you see the one on the left has a drop-down menu in the teaser area. The one on the right has more of a teaser again. It's just some variety and choices that the departments for their unique needs can have. The Center for Academic Success uses that drop-down menu. Instead of, I think it was like a seven or eight-click process to get to help in my subject that I'm struggling with, it's right there in the menu. I need help with biology. It's going to be the second choice right there and it sends into the page with all of the information that somebody needs help with biology could get to. So looking a little bit closer at the variety within these two templates and how we did it. So again, this is the Center for Academic Success page. Kind of going through the first part here. Control over the image. This is all just on the content type in the department node. These are just choices of how the fields are structured and what tools were used to create this page. The drop-down menu is just a set of links and then it builds into that. And then we've got, notice those are empty. So those are fields that they chose not to use instead of the drop-down menu. And so that's how this page got published with this configuration. Now if we switch over to the other one, right, same content type, same node, same set of fields and it's just choices of what was used. This is flat. I didn't want to do the live demo thing but if we pulled up the actual page, the images in the main area rotate through. We didn't do a carousel. I encourage you all to go to ShouldIUseAcarousel.com to know why we didn't do a carousel. But they still wanted some semblance of motion on the page, right? So we built rotating kind of background images for the teaser area for the departments that chose to use them. Again, back here, one image, that one just stays because they like Mike the Tiger right there, right? Studying on his MacBook. But Veteran and Military Services had a few more photos. Wanted to kind of give that imagery and that feel. So that's just upload a second image and it works and they could do many more. They use these fields. So that's how the teaser appears instead of the drop-down menu and left the drop-down menu fields empty so it doesn't appear. No code has to change for this. This is all just kind of taken care of and it's just, you know, you can do a variety for your department and this kind of carries through the page. There's more options on the bottom, you know, just through choice of images. The one site here used the icons in that second row of things to promote and made it more like a secondary navigation element, which wasn't what we intended when we were building this out but that's what they took and ran with it and works for them. Those were more thought of as teasers for news and information that could kind of update the page and have new things flowing through and that's how they chose to do those pieces there. And now I've messed up my flow, there we go. Looking at the footer of the site and again on these department nodes, so we're a little lower on the screen here for these two departments. This is all editable and controllable. So on the left you see the contact information, somebody's phone number changes or, you know, moved to a different thing, need a different email, it's just editable text. Again, it's another field on the node. Simple stuff but powerful because we're giving that control. Nobody has to go to a developer to change the footer code site wide, right? And then what I think is interesting is the social media links. Remember we got 15 departments, 15 Twitter feeds, some have Facebook, some don't like Facebook, Pinterest came about, they wanted to put that in there, others have no Pinterest and don't want one, right? So how do you deal with that, right? And do it in a graphical way. In the theme, there are these icons that are mapped to classes that the menu spits out. So this is a standard Drupal menu for these footer links and by naming the menu item Twitter, it's going to insert that class, call the class in the theme, I see Chris in the background, tell me if I'm getting this right, right? And that's what makes the menu appear. The menu item appear with the icon and then you can control as you see kind of in the bottom left like this is my Twitter feed linked to my Twitter page, not the main LSU one and another department can have another and then choose which ones you want to have. So if we decided Pinterest is no longer of interest, we're not going to have it anymore, unpublish that menu link, Pinterest goes away and the other department could go in their department menu and do a different set of them, right? As long as we know of the social media network and have the icon in the theme, everything else works. I think we've added a couple since it launched, so it's not a big ordeal to add them in either. Again, we've been talking about the department node content type in case you care to see here's the fields, right, that we were just talking about. This is the node configuration screen in the Drupal admin and the series of fields that are made available. Again, the choices that were made and then in the background, things decide where and how it's going to appear and handles the formatting nicely, right? So we've got an example here is the footer columns like I was just talking about. The example on this only chose to use one. This could actually go across and have if they wanted kind of a footer menu site navigation type thing. The footer columns field allows for that to allow up to four I think can fit down there, right? And that's all editable, manageable within these fields. This isn't the prettiest, remember? But this is kind of the background of the structure of that department page using panels and panelizer in particular. So department, home pages are nodes in organic groups and then they're panelized. So we looked at the top section in the fields. The bottom part of that page has left and right columns that are completely flexible through panelizer to choose what we want to put in here. And that's this first column and second column regions. Probably should have given you a screenshot of what those are. But choice, there's some defaults that come. There's a stack of news headlines and events published in there that automatically appear. But not every department has events. Not every department wants to publish news every day or every month even. And they will take those out and maybe drop in a YouTube video in the lower left. One place doesn't like the events format and doesn't want to publish events in there. They have a Google calendar, so they just embedded the Google calendar in the lower left region. Panelizer helps us do that to put these different content panes in mix and match and change the order per department. Rather than it being one template, one structure, you're always going to have your news stack here, right? So those were just some examples. But again, let's get into some of the lessons learned. Like what things might we do differently, what worked well through just lots of those decisions and choices in building this platform. Three things that I've got check marks here so they went well. But the story I want to tell here is a lot of this stuff kind of came along with things that Drupal does well. Again, the community view, all the people with the tools to help you do it well. We did not spend a ton of time necessarily focused on these three areas, but it's three things we've measured after the fact. And hey, those went pretty well without having to do it, right? The other choices we've made for things like that URL structure and other things led to some good results here without a whole lot of customization or focus. So for example, SEO results, right? Logical URLs, good menu structure, meta tags module, right? For good default meta tags, publishing in with the tokens from the content type. The students.lsu.edu site ranks highly for all these keywords that other departments on campus that aren't on Drupal are like, how the heck are you ranking above me? My department's not even on your platform. I can't get my site above yours, right? For some of these keywords, it's great, right? It's like, well, because we're on Drupal. You know, 917 keywords in the top 50 and this isn't a non-branded meaning keywords that don't start with LSU, for example. So, and y'all can check me on this, we pulled this report a few weeks ago. Maybe it's still there, but how to balance checking account? Not at LSU, just how to balance my checking account, right? Tools for students to help them succeed and tools like the students.lsu.edu site ranks in the, I think, the top 10 for that, right? Pretty cool. That's not something we optimized for, but, you know, worked out pretty well. Security. We survived Drupal getting, yay. If you're not familiar, Drupal get in. There was a critical security release. A lot of sites were impacted. I believe it was in, like, the fall of 2014, if I'm getting my days correct. Just read from you here the email exchange we had related to Drupal get in. I think it's a, it's one that I really enjoyed. So, I think that security release came out on October 15th. On October 29th, I got an email from the IT manager on campus. The guy that had to deal with the multi-site and those 15 deployments I talked about. Again, this is 14 days later. Please address this update as soon as possible. Drupal.org, PSA, blah, blah, blah, right? Oh no, let me check. Again, I'm not the guy that does the code. I was able to send him this reply. I will double-check, but I believe this PSA is a follow-up on the security updates that we had proactively made on the site when the issue was first identified. I said to my client, this was a security update I mentioned to you last week. The client was copied in the email from the IT manager. That was great to send. The reply I got, thanks. I knew you'd be on top of it, yay. Now, how did we do that, right? We'll get into some of the configuration management in a second, but it's through what I think was a successful use of Drupal features and helping us to release without fear of side effects, right? We've got a solid core platform using mostly contributed modules in standard ways. There's not a lot of hacks or things on those modules. So we don't get the unexpected results that you can see. Like, wait, why did this break? Oh, I pushed the release for that. And it's really good. One of the main ways we're able to do that, I'll show you in a slide about features coming up here in a minute. Accessibility. It's a big topic. Universities in particular at risk of lawsuits and things, right? It's a responsibility to make your site accessible to all. But it's not only a responsibility. I mean, it's an important thing to do, right? You wouldn't, like, only build a website for people that are right-handed and not serve the left-handed people, right? So why not make your site useful to all who need it? And that's kind of the goal. What we did, again, Drupal helps with a lot of this. We just made some small choices in the build phase that we knew would help towards this, but didn't have a whole cycle of the project to just focus on this. Small choices like, it's an image upload field. Let's make the alt text a required piece of that image upload module and field, right? So that to put an image up on the site, you have to supply me some alt text, right? So that screen readers can do something with that image as well. What we did, though, afterwards is we did an accessibility audit of the site. How did we do it? How's it doing, right? Found that we're in pretty good shape, thanks to mostly default things in Drupal for the, I don't know the pronunciation of the acronym, but the WCAG level AA guidelines, right? Which is what we tried to follow. Did find some things that we needed to fix up, right? Create a punch list and completed those. And what I'm particularly proud of, you know, it was far enough along, in the footer, site-wide, is a link that says accessibility and points people to, that's the screenshot on the top half of the page, a place with a form and other methods to contact because accessibility, like anything else, you're not just done with it, right? You're not done with SEO. It's a living site. There's content going into it every day. Any of it might, you know, not work for somebody in some way. So it requires coming back, having monitoring programs, but also allowing a reporting mechanism. Are you having a particular problem with a part of the site? Let us know. Then we'll fix it, right? It's not a boxy check. It's something you follow along the way and have to constantly keep on top of. So I'm glad we've got the accessibility statement in there. You can find accessibility statement generators online that, and that's what we use just to generate the statement that we were confident in saying, you know, about the site and what we think it meets. But it doesn't definitively say it's absolutely compliant with everything you might think of. It says, we think we've done it, but if you're having a problem, let us know, right? And that's the purpose of the accessibility statement. It kind of lets the user know the baseline that you're trying to follow, provides a link to that baseline, and provides a mechanism to report against it if you find a problem. I talked about problems that we've uncovered since the site's been in the wild for a while. That's pretty. Table code for layouts, if you look closely enough in there. I really don't look too closely. It's some ugly stuff. If you have a WYSIWYG editor, right? That is an open invitation to create some fun. But, you know, what we found in here was, and this may be something you experience as well, a lot of, you know, marking and communications activity on campus is still in a print mindset, right? Thinking of things like it's a page layout. And using tables is that crutch in the code to arrange that wall of logos or whatever it may be, right? We've done the best we can to accommodate that once, but once you enable that table button or allow it in the code, you're going to get some. One thing we did was allow for classes that tables at least don't break the responsive design. If the table gets too wide, it's not going to blow out the template. It's going to insert scroll bars. Not ideal, but it doesn't break, right? So beware the table button in your WYSIWYG. If you enable it, you'll get things that look like this. This is an example of what I'll call a list page. So staff lists or other things. And we have a way to solve for these styled lists, right? With a style applied to the thumbnail, you know, with a nice circle and everything. It can be done, like I said. There's no custom code to create that, and I don't have to go into the WYSIWYG and make this a table, but there's a lot of steps in how we built it. So I can do it because I can call up, you know, some of the developers who are there in the back and ask, how did we configure that module and work my way through? But so to create this list, the user would have to create the basic page node, create people nodes, right? Create a node queue so that we could order and put the list of people in the thing. Then assign person nodes to the node queue, panelize the basic page, and put the node queue block view into the panelized basic page node. Sounds simple, right? Your student worker can be trained on this and... So it can be done, not the best, like I said. What I am excited about, and we've just installed it, we started using it, and it's pretty cool coming along. Some of the stuff Drew actually showed in his keynote of some of the media management and other kind of editor experience looks even better. So I look forward to some of that. That would solve a lot of these problems. But this is the paragraphs module. And number one, it didn't disrupt any of that other flow. It didn't break any of that, putting it in the site. And it just gives a friendlier set of steps to do that same task I just talked about. Because what it creates is bundles, and you can have many bundles, of fields. So it's almost like a content type, sort of. But then this bundle becomes a field in your content type. And then as the user's publishing into that field, they can choose which type of bundle they want. I want a list bundle, and it'll give me all the fields to make my list. Right there in those same node edit form, I don't have to go to panelizers and node queues and all that fun stuff. It's all in that place. Select, fill out, there's some of that. That's how the fields look in the node edit form to start to make that list. You can choose what fields go in there, choose what displays, things like that. I'm not an expert on paragraphs yet, so I'll stop there. There's a session tomorrow that I'm very much looking forward to about paragraphs in that module. So you can look for that on your schedule. But we're excited about this creating simpler steps for what's seemingly a simple thing, right? And give better control and options for a nice style list of things on a page. Seems easy, right, but don't use the tables and maybe don't go down the panelizer node queue gumbo of stuff. Drupal 8 images. Put an image in line in my text and align it left or right. Amazingly complex in Drupal 6 and 7. I mean, it can be done, but there's like this configuration of modules and things and extra screens and clicks or something you have to put in the theme file. This is a screenshot. Again, Louisiana Drupal User Group, we just played around at one of our meetups with Drupal 8. And I was amazed. This was like my first impression of Drupal 8 when we did this was like, wow, images just do that, right? You put in, there's an image button, I think in the WYSIWYG. It pops up this modal. You can upload the image and then you can tell it, align left, center, right. Provide a caption and the caption will display too. Simple stuff that could be done in Drupal 7, but it took a lot more effort to configure things in a friendly way. I don't think we ever got there. This seems much simpler. I'm looking forward to it. I talked about features earlier, right? With the deployment and configuration. So one of the things that happens with Drupal Features is overrides. So Drupal Features takes a set of configuration options that you've made and can export that and converts it into code, which is good because it's in your code repository. You can always recover from things. But what happens is if you put too much in there, if you cross the line and you get into content going into your features, then that gets edited in production because it's content, like what words are said in a menu. And that will lead to overrides. And that's where, again, the choice to keep content out of our features but keep the basic configuration in allowed us to deploy things like security updates with that confidence. And we're not trampling on overridden features and having those unexplainable side effects sometimes. Drupal 8, oops, I don't have my Drupal 8 screenshot. Drupal 8 has the configuration management options that instead of features, there's more and better ways to do that. Again, I'm not going to be the expert in how it works or give you the walkthrough on that. But we feel like it gets even better. And you have less of that risk of side effects and more control and options and tools with configuration management and Drupal 8 to, again, do security and other update releases without that fear of side effects. Because you can configure and review it in a staging environment and then push those same changes up, including some of the content changes, is my understanding. Again, I think there's several configuration management sessions going on at this conference and much smarter people than me can walk you through how that all works. But we feel like that's another Drupal 8 improvement that will help. And just in summary, like I said before, any system WordPress, all those can technically do the job. And we think Drupal does it well. But with any of these systems, they can't do everything. None of them can. But even if you have to go through multiple node queue steps like I was just showing, always just be focusing on what the site can do. There's always a way, right? You can get through it and try to find that way through contrib modules, configuration site building before you get into that custom code. And assuming that you have to customize something and focus on what it can. With that, I wanted to give everybody a reminder. Please join in for some sprints. At the end of the week here on Friday, community sprints, you don't have to be a developer to participate in sprints. There's plenty of things to do. Folks can always use help testing some of these tools and, you know, reporting bugs, you know, helping organize the issue queue. So community sprints are for everyone. Please join. And thank you. Please also evaluate the session. Sorry for the audio challenges here. But I do have just a couple minutes if anybody has any questions. Also, I'll stick around. Glad to give anybody a walk through, you know, of any specific part of the site that you're curious about or want to see just come find me afterwards or down at the Media Current booth, number 315. Any questions? Yes. So if it's that really messy workflow, she knows how to do it and could do it for her departments, but she'll call and ask for help. But standard content, it's them all day long. We're not publishing content for 15 departments. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good question. So, look, yeah, well, the question's about the user levels and permissions, you know, and how is that managed? Is there a hierarchy to it? And how do they control that? So it starts with organic groups. That was one of the big reasons for organic groups. To let people into the things they can be and what they aren't. Organic groups does make your permissioning a lot more complex in terms of administration of it, because you've added a whole other layer of permissions. There's the Drupal users and roles and permissions tied to that. And at the Drupal roles and permissions level, we have administrator and I don't remember the exact words, but there's levels like department site editor, department site manager, and those control general permissions, like I can or can't publish a news item, regardless of what group I'm in. I do have access to publish that type of node or I don't. Then the organic groups permission comes in with things like, I have permission to edit my department's menu. I can select to publish a node that I have permission to publish the node in general on the site, but I have permission to put that node in my group. That is one of the challenges we run into though, is somebody trying to do something and they can't quite get to it and it's usually like a nested permissions problem. In terms of administration of it, we did have the benefit. All of these departments roll up under one division and the client that I get to meet with who's excellent, she manages that and fields their request initially. If she needs help letting somebody do something, she'll call us and we'll help unlock the mystery of the levels of permissions. Yes. So you mentioned introducing more logical URLs, the department and SEO as a result. Roughly, how much content would move across all of these departments? We had a luxury when it came to content. Sorry, sorry. So the question was about the URLs and how much content was moved into these URLs as the Drupal 7 site launched. So we had a luxury with the migration part of this and that was, LSU was honest with itself and it looked at those sites that I showed the screenshot and said, content in here isn't very good anyway. It's not worth the trouble to migrate it. So we set up the structure and gave all the fields permission, so built a new site from the ground up with this hierarchical organization and then because it was within organic groups, site launches were publishing that department node and making it available to the public and the content underneath it. So it was a rolling launch, a few departments launched and then other ones got their content but it was, they went through a content rewrite as part of the update. That's not always the case and then you get into things like the migrate module or other methods to bring content across from another platform or system but that was a great luxury we had that we weren't bringing some of the old and not as effective messaging into the new. So as far as that decision, was it designed as the old URLs not even worth redirecting? We did account for a lot of the redirects from the main stuff and the hierarchy of the URLs was different. But yeah, the deeper pages within the site, we didn't go too far. But what you can do and the question, sorry I keep forgetting to repeat, the question was over the old URLs of the content that got rewritten, did we redirect at all? And no, we didn't redirect at all but what you can do is monitor for the top four or four errors and see popular things that people are still trying to get to. So we went through a few phases of kind of reviewing that list, hitting the priority items but not spending in an ordered amount of time on the page that's six levels deep that nobody ever saw anyway. That's not always the case though, right? Like sometimes there's a very good case we need to have the continuity and keep things across but I'm realizing we had some luxuries with this build and project. Other questions? Yeah, good question. So translation and localization for the structure and any challenges there. I would guess that the organic groups being in the mix would make it interesting to be honest. I would think that actually I'm pretty confident that a build in Drupal 8 that's going to try to do some of these things and have translation is going to be a little friendlier is kind of a general answer. I'm trying to think if we've done translations on an organic group site and I don't think we have. So that would be the biggest unknown for me is how that would play into the mix and that would be something during a discovery phase to really think about and probably do some vanilla site install testing against like okay if we make these architecture choices and we're going to put translation on top of this, that and the other are things going to play nice together. I'm trying to think I don't know if we have you saw we have panels and panelizer. I don't think we have fieldable panel pains which is a Drupal module in the mix with the panels but I know that can make translations a challenge as well. So what it's really about is if you know you're going into a project and you need or may need some day to offer translations to keep that in mind when you're making the initial decisions of what modules are we going to use and are they going to play nice with translations in particular or any other kind of thing that's not in core but is a big structural thing for the site. I'm looking at Tony in the back and she's going through, it's not a university site but she's going through some of what I just talked about right now with her fieldable panel pains and honestly that's in architecture decision for her site when we were setting some things up we didn't realize at the time we chose a couple of modules that they were going to conflict with how translations were going to want to interact with them as well. Now we're having to kind of address that. Yeah, yeah, it's if you know you're going to be dealing with multiple languages for your site that's one of probably the main things to kind of know up front because there's choices you can make in the very early configuration either in the back end or the front end right you know for the users or the publishers you know how these things are going to work and work together definitely. Yeah, we're fortunate that the main client helps manage a lot of that so what is unique to her is she comes from a marketing background outside of universities and so doesn't always think of things in kind of the university way and tries to apply some of the knowledge there so she's done things like implement a monthly marketing meeting with all the marketing people from all the divisions to kind of pull them together and talk about things like that and kind of show examples and we've gone and presented here's how Google Analytics work for your site and you know configured some reports based on that that they all can use so I think the answer of you know the collaboration across departments a lot happens with you know coordination on the client side because you know they have her kind of in the the central role and is trying to promote those sorts of things. Yeah, but I mean we see that a lot where you know sometimes we're the ones introducing departments to one another and trying to make those recommendations of you know why things are the way they are right. Yeah, sure, yeah that's an interesting one so the question is user management and how to deal with the volume of users and different departments and who gets what permission so there's a single sign-on with the campus accounts that first establishes a login for anybody in the site and it uses the CAS module CAS to interact with so we didn't build the single sign-on that's a campus thing right but the Drupal CAS module just plugged right into it and worked beautifully so first step is they log in with their LSU account right so they don't it's not like a separate like we created a Drupal user for you so once they're in there then it's knowing that that person needs access to this group this department in this role right controlled through the the division head knowing the people and who needs to be able to do what and she'll assign the groups and the roles I think I'm running out of time yeah I'll stand right out here if anybody else wants to talk through more