Drupal Development

Your Website plus the Power of Drupal. Additional features that make your website an incredible experience

• Enhanced Content Management System Experience

  Probably the biggest issue facing content editors dealing with vanilla Drupal forms is, well, they're very Druaal-esque. As such, we've found it necessary to provide some basic overhauls to the content entry form, "de-Drupalizing" many of the terms seen in the UI with ones that non-Drupal users can understand. We've also seen many of the traps that non-Drupal users fall into, and deliver every new site with built-in help. 

  It's also important to understand the proper set of modules that will aid content entry. For example, having a properly configured WYSIWYG editor will keep your content editors "honest" to your site's theme and prevent them from accidentally pasting in potentially harmful scripts. 

• Complete Workflow

  Drupal 11 ships with not one, but two built-in workflow modules:

  1. The Drupal 11 Workspaces module provides an Agile-like workflow for creation process. It’s meant to be used on a group of new pages, existing items like menus, and other content like tags, to be published all at once. Read all about this module on our Drupal 11 demo site.
  2. The Drupal 11 basic workflow module provides a content creation and publishing workflow that's well suited for even the most complex use cases. For example, you want all internal company events requiring a dedicated room to be approved by a facilities person before being published. The core Drupal workflow module can handle this requirement very easily.
     
     Now suppose your event is published to the calendar but someone goes in and changes the date, room, or time. Again, this situation is handled with ease by Drupal by un-publishing the event until Facilities has approved the date, room, or time change again. 
     
     As an added bonus, Drupal will send out all the email notifications to the proper people/roles during any stage/trigger of the workflow and your event can be set to expire and be pulled from the calendar automatically at a set date/time.

  You can test-drive the workflow module and many other features on our Drupal 11 demo site.

• Automated Form Generation

  Automated forms is one of the many examples in which the power of Drupal can be harnessed to greatly benefit your content editors and site visitors. For example, when performing a review of a site map, it was discovered that over 60 webforms were being used/maintained for downloading collateral. What's worse is that all these forms needed maintenance code to synchronize the data populated in the form with a CRM platform. Plus the form had extra un-necessary fields for gathering user data that was often faked, like country, stage, zipcode, and so on.  

  After the re-design, content managers could choose one of six base forms, populate the introduction text, form title, button title, and a few other places, and Drupal took care of the rest by creating a page with an embedded form and all the embedded and surrounding text. The form was also only half as large since we were able to extract geo information from the end user to populate important fields without the user being able to give false information.

• Hierarchal Data Relationships with Automated Content Sharing

  With a properly configured Drupal site, you can easily share content in numerous ways. One such method is the idea of parent-child relationship in which some or all of the parent's content may be re-used on one or more child pages. Some examples of where child pages may wish to share content include the following:

  • Banners and photos
  • Contact and location information
  • Related links and documents
  • Menus

  The idea behind content sharing is the desire to only edit content in one place (the parent), and have all the changes automatically propagate to all child pages. The decision of how children share parent resources is as simple as clicking user interface checkboxes. This allows limitless permutations between child pages. This approach is completely different from the idea of blocks built in Drupal that are managed in a different area and typically require either a list of pages to include/exclude or someone to write code to determine where/when blocks should be displayed (Yuk!).

  At Webdrips, one of our philosophies is to never leave a customer with a site that's either difficult to use or difficult to manage. After all, we may be Drupal experts, but we don't expect the same of you.

• Relationship-based Content Surfacing

  With Drupal, automated data surfacing can be done many different ways, most of which are straightforward to implement. Once implemented, content editors typically need only select an item from a dropdown or autocomplete list to create the reference. After the reference is in place, virtually anything associated with the referenced content may be surfaced with ease.

  For example, suppose you wish to display the professor's photo on all news articles written by that person. Not a problem with Drupal: simply select the professor's name when creating the news article and Drupal takes care of the rest (displaying the image linked to the professor in the proper size and position in this case). How about a directory listing with the professor's names, photos, and contact information? Again, this is a snap with Drupal, and this example can be completely automated, with no content editor involvement required past creating the professors' bio pages.  

• Automated Menus

  Often times, it's desirable to create context-sensitive menus that are only displayed on pages associated with a given section of the site or a particular "type" of content (e.g. a news article). With Drupal, this task is generally pretty simple straightforward. There are even methods to generate menus on-the-fly as content is created, reducing or even eliminating the overhead and errors associated with adding/editing menus.

• Geo-Sensitive Content

  As with just about everything else in Drupal, dozens of methods exist to display content based on a user's location. The most common example of this is geo-sensitive advertisements. Whatever your geo-sensitive data may be, we'll help find methods to display it based on user locations.

• Dynamic and Related Content

  Automated content display (data surfacing) implies data is entered in one place, but may displayed in many others automatically. For example, professors teach classes and are typically associated with one or more departments, publications, and so on. Wouldn't it be nice if a link to that professor's bio page was automatically displayed with any page they're associated with? Drupal is exceptionally well suited for data surfacing and displaying related content.