I’ve been working on a few new Drupal projects this fall, as well as a WordPress site, and they’ve led me to ruminate a bunch about standards and best practices, and why they’re extra important for the kinds of nonprofits I serve.
I just wrapped up my most recent project—a rebuild for Action Against Hunger (ACF USA)—and it was one of the most satisfying projects I've done in a long time. I was really excited for the chance to build a Drupal 7 site, but during the discovery process of the project, we tried our best to talk them out of it. We were concerned that too many modules wouldn't be ready for prime time, and that they'd have to compromise too much on functionality. And here's where the project got really interesting. Basically, we decided to cleanse their site with the fire of Drupal 7.
It's been a very busy and summery summertime for me. Lots of berry picking and being outside, swimming and picknicking. Work-wise, I've been building a Drupal 7 site for a great nonprofit org with whom it's been a joy to work. It's a sizeable site with a complex design. I was worried that Drupal 7 wouldn't be up to the task. But so far, so good.
There's Facebook and Twitter, and many of us spend a fair amount of time there, myself included. But I belong to many other smaller online communities. Some of them are particularly interesting places where there are tech-related socializing and resource-sharing discussions that I don't want to miss, and so I check in with them regularly. Here are my current favorite nonprofit tech geeky places to hang out online:
The "5 Things I'm Reading Now" block you see to your right is a feed coming from my new WordPress site, labs.johannabates.com. After migrating this blog to Drupal 7, I found I missed having a WordPress site to play with. So I set one up, and the next thing I knew I was using it as a kind of "cloud notebook", a place to store links and ideas.
If you're in a Flickr photostream or group pool or photo set, there's a "Slideshow" button in the upper right corner that has "share" options. These share options give you embeddable code that you can drop into content on any site. What's great about it: it's easy to use. What's not so great about it? It's Flash. Flash is notorious for being far less cross-browser/platform compatible and user-accessible than Javascript/jQuery. If you are comfortable installing Drupal modules and using Views, it's not hard to pull any RSS feed into Drupal from Flickr and use Views to generate a jQuery slideshow. 
I found this image via a Flickr Creative Commons search. Just to be extra safe, I asked the photographer if I could use it on my blog. Then I right-clicked on the image and copied its Flickr URL, pasted that Flickr URL right into my image field in Drupal, and slurp! It's on my server! Not bad!
Hah! Did I get you with the "effortless"? The thing about Drupal, like most open souce CMS platforms, is that you can get it to a place where it's an amazingly easy and powerful way to admin your content, but you have to put in a bunch of effort first. This is especially true if you're an early adopter and like to experiment with the newest version of Drupal.
One thing I'm doing with this blog site of mine, besides blogging, is using it to test essential modules and features that most web content admins need and want. Like the ability to easily upload and insert images into a piece of content. So when I read this Module Monday post by Lullabot, I got excited.
I came across this great post by Amanda Luker of the Drupal consulting firm Advomatic: Designing for Drupal: Dos and Don'ts. It describes some key principles that designers can use to ensure their designs are reasonably build-able in Drupal: "reuse, flexibility and standardization."
It’s taken me a whole week to pull together my thoughts about the 2011 NTC conference. Marc Baizman beat me to the punch on Idealware. He sums up a lot of how I feel, though my conference food expectations are so low that bad food doesn’t make my list.
