Easy Drupal, The Solution (well, our solution anyway)

Track: 
Design and UX
Experience: 
Intermediate

Drupal O is easy. This installation profile was built by StarsWithStripes.Org to be managed by part time webmasters without any Drupal or website experience. For us, “easy” boils down to five core principles:

1. Never post the same thing twice.
2. No knowledge of nodes, blocks or views required.
3. Easy to navigate.
4. Simple to delegate.
5. Consistent and intuitive.

Following these five guidelines throughout development, we’ve come up with a user interface we’re proud to share with the world. Our recipe is scalable and easy to replicate. And most importantly, our users like it too.

In this session we’ll give you a tour of the Drupal O user interface. Along the way we’ll explain our decisions about what to show (and hide from) end-users, and we’ll describe how our users’ experiences have shaped and re-shaped the project.

Intended audience: 

Anyone who feels responsible for making the end-product “easy”.

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
How can someone effectively manage a Drupal site without knowing what a node is?
Question 2: 
How do you make things appear in the sidebars without administering blocks?
Question 3: 
How do you give end users the ability to control dynamic content without teaching them Views?
Question 4: 
How do you make features modules easy to understand and interact with for the end user?
Question 5: 
How can I add to Drupal O in a way that is consistent with the existing user interface?
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Comments

Is this available anywhere?

Is this available anywhere?

Yes! Download the code here...

Yes. Thanks for asking. Download here:
http://starswithstripes.org/download

Here are some additional resources you may find useful...

Demo website (please log in and try creating a news clip or other types of content):
log in here: http://drupalo.starswithstripes.org/user
user: demo
pass: demo

Videos:
Demo: http://starswithstripes.org/drupal-o-demo
About Alpha Release: http://starswithstripes.org/drupal-o-alpha-release

Here are a few examples of live sites:
http://starswithstripes.org/portfolio

Here are a few examples of designs, or "skins", implemented with our Subtheme module:
http://starswithstripes.org/designs

yeah!

State and local political campaigns and elected officials, who typically have very low budgets, are NOT well served by other generic CMS offerings, nor can they afford most Drupal consulting shops in order to get a good Drupal site. Furthermore, legislative offices typically don't have dedicated webmasters to learn HTML or Drupal.

It's empowering to us as citizens to be able to give our elected officials tools like Drupal O that are easy enough to use for them to be able to manage their own websites, and yet are still truly open-source so that they're not locked in to a single vendor/consultant.

From what I've seen of Drupal O (my family's State Senator uses it in Massachusetts), it's the first open-source CMS offering that fits the bill. More generally, I'm excited to see new Drupal "products" such as Drupal O that are aimed at very specific use cases and non-technical customers.

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