johanna bates

From Emma Jane Hogbin's presentation on Slideshare

The orgs I love to work with most are almost always on fairly tight budgets. I often find that people's expecations of how a website should be built is backwards, or it's generic and—once Drupal has been chosen—this generic approach does a great disservice to a project budget. In a typical scenario, the org and designer consider the content that needs designing, come up with a web design and sitemap, and then expect Drupal developers to map that vision of the site into Drupal, and perhaps fudge the places where it's not a perfect fit.

To nonprofit tech geeks: I bring glad tidings. There is going to be more to love at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conrerence this year. First, a quick rundown of the Drupal content planned to date for the 2012 NTC in San Francisco. Then, some background on changes in the NTC that aim to improve it for those of us who are seasoned nptechies.

• Pre-Conference NTC Drupal Day for Nonprofit IT Professionals, Tuesday April 3rd, 9:30am - 3pm: This new event is in the conference hotel, right before the conference kicks off. Sean Larkin and ThinkShout are lead facilitators, along with the Drupal Association, Civic Actions, OpenSourcery, and Jackson River. Read more on ThinkShout's blog. You can register for Drupal Day as part of your conference registration.
• Drupal Breakout sessions:
  • Building & Supporting Drupal Websites: In-House, Outhouse, or Both? Wednesday, April 4th, 10:30am - 12pm.
  • Drupal Best Practices for Empowering Non-Profits, Wednesday, April 4th, 1:30pm - 3pm.
  • Advanced Drupal Users Salon, Thursday, April 5th, 1:30pm - 3pm. 

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. 

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.

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.