2015 Sessions

Website design is critical to the success of your site, however, many people confuse design with complicated schemas that introduce gadgets and widgets that distract from the purpose of the site. In this session, I will cover some basic design principles that will help you to conceptualize the esthetics and implement them to help support your sites message. 

Planning a website? Start here!

The process of “Discovery” encompasses getting to know your stakeholders, understanding the target audience for your site, and defining your communication and experience goals. The result is a common vision for your website—a vision that will guide you through the website creation process and ensure the long-term success of your project.

We will discuss several methods we use to 

(1) Elicit requirements from your major stakeholders to answer the question: What are our goals?

(2) Gather feedback from your target audience to answer the question: Are we meeting our goals?

Sometimes, you just gotta lock it down.  I’ll review some simple ways to use the Content Access, Protected Node, and CAS modules to restrict access to your whole site, parts of your site, by role/user, or to an external-to-Yale group. Whether you want only a certain audience to see your content or you want to share a draft page on your live site with only a few folks, these tools will allow you to do just that (and more!). I will also demo a few practical examples, showing how I’ve used these modules in the past year.

I’ll cover basics of user management in Drupal.

Concepts I’ll cover will include:

1. Roles and permissions in Drupal
2. How permissions relate to other Drupal concepts like modules and content types
3. Permissions, content access, and content creation
4. Security implications of permissions
5. How CAS enhances Drupal user management
6. Troubleshooting user management
7. Resources/tutorials for user management

I will demo key tasks such as:

1. Creating a new user
2. Assigning a role to a user
3. Modifying permissions for a role
4. (time permitting) How to adjust WYSIWYG editor defaults for roles

I want to leave 10 minutes or so for Q&A. 

Join us in the Lounge area for Abates Pizza and salad. Enjoy the food and the conversation; a lot of networking and learning takes place here.

This session will cover a few high level topics related to Information Architecture, including:

• When to build out a site structure using menus, taxonomies, views, or other strategies
• Sitemaps: Pages vs Nodes
• Supporting Navigation and Findability

Learn about different ways to search, filter, and compare in Drupal.

1. Learn how to configure searches by:

• Single or multiple choice (either text list or taxonomy terms)
• Free text search
• Tag (taxonomy term, as a Tag cloud)

2. Learn how to configure sortability

3. Learn how to configure a module that lets users compare items side-by-side (click here for an example)

The Class Web Tools site offers a way to search for web applications the same way you would shop for items on Amazon. You can search by category, filter by feature or functionality, and even compare tool fields in a table format. Learn about which modules offer this specialized search functionality, and how they were used and configured for this site.

Click here for the presentation