A Drupal State of Mind

• By Matthew Callahan
• February 10, 2010

Lately it seems as though just about everyone is jumping on the Drupal bandwagon: toy manufacturer Mattel, legendary musician Eric Clapton, and even the White House. With such a star-studded assortment of individuals and organizations building their websites in Drupal, it’s no small wonder that the project is laden with awards and growing at a phenomenal rate. It’s not just celebrities that use Drupal, however. In the past several months, we’ve recommended Drupal as a solution for an increasing number of clients.

Museums and arts & cultural organizations, in particular, often have a great deal of content to disseminate, much of which is organized into discrete categories and hierarchies. When dealing with virtually any content management system, content can be organized and labeled, categorized or tagged in some manner. Drupal provides all of the standard methods along with the powerful classification module Taxonomy.

At this point, you may be wondering if I’m going to launch into a big tutorial on Taxonomy and the like; I don’t plan to, but it’s often difficult to see the forest for the trees when considering the vast array of options Drupal gives you to organize your site. And there’s the segue to my real point: how does thinking about content in Drupal differ from content on a standard website (or a less full-featured CMS)?

In my personal experience, it’s best to treat Drupal as an entirely different beast. Instead of visualizing your site in terms of pages, imagine all of the various pieces of information that make up each page as being individual nodes. Are there recurring types of content, such as a block to display the newest registered member or the excerpt from the latest blog post? Perhaps you have something more complex in mind, like the following.

As an example, say you manage your book club’s website, and you would like your fellow book club members to be able to see what the current book is, even if they missed the last meeting. Instead of typing in all the book’s information on your homepage, only to delete and replace it with the new book next month, you could create a custom content type for your Book of the Month. You’d include information like the title, the author, the discussion date and even an ISBN number. Then, with a little Drupal magic, you could set up your homepage to show a neat little block displaying the latest Book of the Month. Next month, you would add a new book, and set it to be the active Book of the Month. As an added bonus, you could set up a node that displays all the past books your club has read.

This is just one quick example of how Drupal changes the way we approach content. In Drupal, content is made reusable by creating content types with all the necessary fields, and letting Drupal do the work of displaying it. This also makes it easier for content managers, who simply have to fill out clearly labeled forms to create content rather than dealing with a nebulous text box and possibly even hand-coding HTML. And that is the Drupal state of mind.

For a look at the variation in features and custom design work that can be done in Drupal, check out some of our projects:

• Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association
• Five Freedoms Project
• Delaware Valley Innovation Network

Filed under: blog, resources, trends