The first step in planning your site to the University's Enterprise Drupal service is to document your requirements.
Review the Drupal Service Functionality
The University's Enterprise Drupal platform provides a wide variety of functionality out of the box, including the following.
- Content Types including:
- Basic page
- Landing page
- Layout Controls
- Media Support (audio, video, images)
- Base theme with University of Minnesota branding (see the Folwell theme website)
- Search (available in the header)
Document Business Logic and Functionality
Make a list of the functionality your site currently uses. It is important to identify the details of the content and any dynamic functionality. Short descriptions can help. Here are a couple of examples:
- News
- News landing page
- Lists the latest news at the top including News title, News image and News Lead text (a.k.a. teaser text) and Posted date
- Title and Image link to the full News page
- News Content type
- Includes fields: Title, Body, Image, Lead text, Author, Posted date
- Author and posted date are displayed when viewing the full News page
- News landing page
- Home Page
- Features up to four pieces of content
- Each featured content displays a Title, Image, Lead Text, Title, and Image link to the full content
- Features up to four pieces of content
- Search
- A Search form is provided in the header
Identify Requirements to Rebuild
Determine if the Service Meets Your Requirements
It is expected that a site moving to the Drupal service will need some additional work once the content is migrated from an existing content management system. For example, a site owner may want to set up a single blog for the site. The site owner should determine the blog requirements and document them. For example:
Requirement: Blog
Contributors and editors may create blog posts on the site. A link is provided in the primary navigation labeled "Blog." It links to a landing page that lists blog posts in order by most recently published first. Blog posts need to have a Title, Body, Image and Tags fields. Tags is a taxonomy which allows the user to add keywords which represent the subject of the blog and link it to other blog posts which use the same tag. When a blog post is in a list, the blog title and a blog teaser (first 200 characters of the Body) are displayed. The blog title is a link to view the entire blog post. The blog post's posted date is displayed when viewing the entire blog post so readers can easily identify when the content was created.
The above requirement can be built in Drupal without having to access the code directly.
Decide if a Requirement Could Be Transformed
In some cases current functionality is not really a requirement any more or needs to be transformed to meet the needs of mobile device and tablet users. For example, if the home page includes a slideshow (a.k.a. slider) of images and text, it is best to restructure this slideshow to show separate featured content on the home page. Transforming the slideshow will set up the home page to successfully work on mobile devices like phones and tablets and increases the likelihood of a user clicking any of the featured items.