Talking Drupal #432 - Portals & Community Websites
Jan 8, 2024
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Ron Northcutt, a Drupal expert specializing in portals and community websites, discusses the passion behind community sites, different types of portals, and common features. They explore why Drupal is a great fit and unique aspects of each community. The importance of UX, common content models, and the choice between Drupal and Saas/PaaS are also discussed. The episode concludes with valuable tips for building community websites.
Drupal's flexibility and customization options make it a suitable choice for building portals and community websites, allowing developers to tailor features to meet specific needs and integrate with other systems.
When embarking on the development of a portal or community website, it is crucial to have a clear plan and understanding of the desired features and target audience, involving experienced architects or product owners to ensure project success.
Investing in user experience (UX) design, especially for the admin and editorial interfaces, helps streamline content creation and management, easing user concerns and promoting engagement in portals and community sites.
Deep dives
Importance of Flexibility and Customization in Drupal
Drupal's flexibility and customization options are key factors that make it a suitable choice for building portals and community websites. With Drupal, developers have the ability to tailor features to meet specific needs and integrate with other systems. This flexibility allows for personalized user experiences, such as upvoting content, crowdsourcing, and implementing notifications. Drupal's extensive module library and fieldability of different entities further enhance its capability to support diverse types of sites over time. The architecture and API of Drupal make it easier to extend functionality and add new features, providing a solid foundation for ongoing development and growth.
Considerations for Building Portals and Community Sites
When embarking on the development of a portal or community website, it is crucial to have a clear plan and understanding of the desired features and target audience. Engaging with an experienced architect or product owner can help navigate these decisions and ensure the project's success. Identifying common and unique features for the site type allows for effective prioritization and implementation. Drupal's versatility allows for the creation of different types of community sites, whether it's developer portals, content-driven communities, or interactive forums. Investing in user experience (UX) design, especially for the admin and editorial interfaces, helps streamline content creation and management, easing user concerns and promoting engagement.
Improving Admin UX and Simplifying Content Management
In building portals and community sites, the user experience for administrators and content creators is key to ensuring smooth and efficient content management. Providing a clean and intuitive admin interface with well-organized forms, clear descriptions, and smart defaults greatly reduces friction for users. Offering training and support to address any user fears or misconceptions allows individuals to feel more comfortable exploring and making edits within the system. Encouraging a culture of experimentation and embracing the ability to learn from mistakes promotes a collaborative environment where users are empowered to publish, edit, and improve content without hesitation. By prioritizing UX for administrators, Drupal facilitates faster content management and enhances the overall experience for site contributors.
Key Points on Choosing a Community Platform
When choosing a community platform, consider your needs and resources to determine the best fit. It depends on your current and future requirements as well as the availability of development teams and budget. Off-the-shelf solutions like SaaS offerings may be suitable for those with limited resources and technical expertise. However, they come with potential limitations, vendor lock-in, and integration challenges. DIY solutions using Drupal or similar platforms offer greater control and scalability, allowing for customizations and avoiding third-party dependency. The key is to assess your needs and capabilities for both short-term and long-term success.
Effective Content Models and Considerations
When building a community site, effective content models can enhance the user experience. Common content types include articles, tutorials, and user profiles. Using clear taxonomies and entity models helps establish consistency and ease of content creation. It is essential to balance content type complexity and maintain a manageable number of types to avoid content bloat. Additionally, leveraging media types for different purposes, such as avatars and covers, can facilitate reuse, improve organization, and enhance scalability. Finding the right content balance and exploring module options can create a solid foundation for content management.
Today we are talking about Portals, Community Websites, and Drupal with guest Ron Northcutt. We’ll also cover Private Message as our module of the week.
Have you ever wanted to include a full-fledged, ajaxified system for private messages between users on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that
Brief history
How old: created in Apr 2017 by Jaypan, a fellow Canadian, but the most recent release is by Lucas Hedding, who hails from Nicaragua, and is a prolific contrib maintainer in his own right
Versions available: 8.x-2.0-beta18 and 3.0.0 versions available, the latter of which works with D9 and 10
Maintainership
Actively maintained, latest release in Oct 2023
Number of open issues: 130, 4 of which are bugs on the 3.0.x branch
Test coverage
Documentation: does have a handbook, though the pages seem to date back to 2017, so hopefully the installation and setup hasn’t changed too much since then
Usage stats:
Almost 2,000 sites
Maintainer(s):
Module features and usage
With the Private Message module installed, users on your site can have permissions-based access to send private messages to each other
Messages and threads are fieldable entities, and in general the module is made to be highly configurable, so you can tailor it to meet your site’s specific needs
That includes the frequency for asynchronous operations like loading new messages, which can be done without a full page refresh. There’s also a companion module to use Node.js for the asynchronous operations, to reduce load on both the browser and the server
That also allows for browser push notifications, or you can use the integration with the Message module to send notifications via email, SMS, and more, including aggregating the notifications into digests
Companies often have a dedicated messaging solution like Slack or Teams that they use internally, but this can be a good solution for an extranet or vendor portal, where the users may represent a variety of organizations
It’s also worth mentioning that both Private Message and Message are included in the Open Social distribution, so that could be a way to try out a preconfigured setup
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