How EPA/ORD Moved to Drupal 7 Jessica Dearie U.S. EPA, Office of Research and Development Office of Science Information Management

 Jessica Dearie ◦ IT Specialist – Federal Government Employee ◦ Web Application Developer turned IT Project Manager ◦ Member of the DC Air National Guard  Javier Gonzalez ◦ Software Engineer, AboutWeb ◦ Technical Lead – ORD Drupal Migration Effort

 Old CMS was on it’s last leg  Embracing Open Government Initiative  moving to Drupal  Eventually – all EPA intranet content will reside in an enterprise roll out of Drupal

 Distributed Content Management ◦ Most CMs had little to no Web CMS experience  New Information Architecture  Migrate content from two sources: OpenCMS and WordPress ◦ Not all content from either would migrate  Use One EPA Workplace site design  IE 7 as our agency standard browser

 Easy to manage content  OneEPA Web Theme created  User Controlled Calendar Filtering  Blog(s)  News Articles  Online Newsletter  Group pages have slideshows, content boxes, filtered events

 Two separate systems to migrate from ◦ openCMS and WordPress  How to map old content to new architecture  “Scrapping” a lot of old content  Strip all styling (lot’s of bad code)  Maintaining WordPress settings (topics and tags)  Incorporating new URL patterns and Node Hierarchy settings

 Drupal 7 ◦ LAMP stack ◦ Two Servers  Development and Production  Content not managed on development server – used to test new features ◦ Lots of Contributed Modules and a few custom ones

 Organic Groups  Node Hierarchy  Context  Calendar, Date … (several Date type modules)  LDAP  FAQ (eventually adding FAQ_Ask)  Webforms

 The Good ◦ Organizational (and some non-org) groups created. ◦ Group pages were customized to create a template for organizational home pages ◦ Multiple roles within each Group ◦ Content managers can manage users within their group  The Bad ◦ Does not play well with editorial workflows

 The Good ◦ Menus managed dynamically ◦ Content stays well organized  The Bad ◦ Hard to manage once site gets large  The Ugly ◦ Menu links to external content (I know, I know) requires admin Menu access ◦ Breadcrumbs for content outside the hierarchy – Custom Breadcrumbs and Node Hierarchy fight for breadcrumb access.

 Allows block placement to be easily managed  Display menus created by Node Hierarchy  Displays fields of certain content types in sidebar  Display special role-based links (Add Event, etc)  Display filtered event content by group on group pages

 Created Event content type, and then built a filter-able calendar  Events use 2 taxonomy vocabularies – ‘Organization’ and ‘Event Type’  Exposed Filters allow users to filter calendar

 The Good ◦ Use existing Active Directory Accounts to generate Drupal accounts  The Bad ◦ Internal network issues has caused authentication problems

 The Good ◦ Ability to create FAQ categories with Taxonomy and then generate FAQs based on topics ◦ FAQ pages have many nice display options  The Bad ◦ Breadcrumbs (Due to Node Hierarchy) ◦ Each question is it’s own content node  The Ugly ◦ To make FAQs truly effective, and ready them for the FAQ_Ask functionality, each question must be written so that it stands on it’s own.

 The Good ◦ Quick and easy form creation ◦ Used for comment boxes, simple forms, etc  The Bad ◦ Inability to easily customize the submitted field key presents difficulties trying to POST forms to external applications

 Basic Page (with sidebar displays)  News  FAQ – (created by FAQ Module)  Group (OG group/Org home pages)  Featured Content  Blog  Newsletter and Newsletter Article  OSIM Service Catalog

 Workbench + Workbench Moderation ◦ Doesn’t allow content managers to assign their own sub-editors – Adding users to sections still relies on admins  Media ◦ Too many issues for migrating our files with Media ◦ Not enough time to develop a full solution ◦ Still investigating how to implement further media requirements

 Make sure your development staff has the right kind of Drupal experience – and a lot of it!  Organize – figure out how you want to organize content - hierarchical vs. taxonomy based  Plan for requirements you expect to have, even if your content managers say they don’t need it.  Media Management – make sure you have enough time to select a media solution – especially if you are doing a migration.

 Invest in training for your content managers  Make sure the interface for content managers is intuitive ◦ Customize your interface  Dashboards  Admin module  Do your Research! ◦ Lots of modules do similar things ◦ Spend time in the issue que ◦ Invest in researching your modules before you start using them

 Rolling Drupal out to Lab and Center Sites ◦ Each site runs it’s own technology (ColdFusion, Lotus Notes, Dreamweaver templates, etc) ◦ Theme in additional navigation area ◦ Features that will be available to all  News  Blog  Calendar  …