Drupal

Website calendars pose one of the great challenges of higher education content management — there are a million options, every school needs one, but each school’s needs vary slightly, and nobody wants to own it. Who knows, if your college or university is like many others, a wide array of calendar tools may already be in place across your institution.

Each year, thousands of developers, designers, content strategists, and industry leaders gather at DrupalCon to share their ideas and experiences using one of the world’s most popular open-source content management solutions. For the 2017 conference, two of our developers and several other members of our team had the opportunity to attend the conference in Baltimore.

Over the past eight years, we’ve designed and developed dozens of large-scale college and university websites using Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. We’ve also been working with Drupal 8 since before its official release in November 2015. Drupal 8 represents a big step forward, and it is the future of the platform. It retains the best features of Drupal 7 and augments it with improvements in user experience, responsive design, performance, scalability, and extensibility. However, Drupal 7 brings continued strengths as a mature platform with access to a robust library of functionality.

We’ve built over 50 education websites using Drupal 6 and 7, so we were excited to dig into the latest version of Drupal that released in the fall of 2015. Drupal 8 brings some significant upgrades to the admin UI and underlying architecture, and it increases the core feature set.

Now that you’ve finished installing the six Drupal modules your website needs for great SEO, it’s time to start thinking about how you can harness the power of Drupal modules to make your website analytics and maintenance much easier.

We’ve picked out six more modules that will help alleviate some of the headaches and roadblocks that might be holding you back in the day-to-day management of your Drupal website.

If you’re a digital marketer managing a website built on a Drupal content management system, there are a seemingly endless number of modules available to help make your life easier. With such a large and active user community supporting Drupal’s open source platform, there are modules already built that can address just about whatever need you have for your website, especially search engine optimization.

To understand how Drupal and WordPress compare, you first have to understand a little about open source. Open source software is software developed by and for the user community, often allowing for a more robust set of features than can be found in commercial products which are limited by a smaller number of contributors.

Since DrupalCon, we’ve been having a lot of conversations around the office about the coming release of Drupal 8 and what it means not only for the Drupal community, but for our clients as well. Based on what we heard at DrupalCon LA, the goal is to have Drupal 8 released around DrupalCon Barcelona. But even though it has yet to have an official release, we hear many organizations have already taken the leap and switched their production sites to Drupal 8.

After a decade of working with numerous Content Management Systems such as Sitecore, Adobe CQ, Ektron, Kentico, and Wordpress, I recently joined OHO Interactive and, for the first time, I’m diving deep into the Drupal CMS, including attending this year’s DrupalCon earlier this month. DrupalCon Los Angeles was a great experience - in fact, I was completely blown away.

Remember the storyline on Seinfeld where George Costanza passes himself off as an architect? It’s a classic, not to mention very entertaining. But really, if George ever did try his hand at architecture, I suspect his buildings would have ended up requiring the help of a firm like Simpson, Gumpertz & Heger (SGH).