Case Studies & Strategic Planning

Many nonprofit organizations use Drupal to run their web sites, and it allows them tremendous power and freedom; it also fails them in many ways if they are not prepared to manage a project before and after launch. There is a constellation of tools to help you make a great site that tells the story of your organization and its work, find supporters, and raise funds. But how do you pull it all together into a coherent web site that really serves your needs? We'll talk about ways to use Drupal for good, and what you need to avoid along the way.

In this talk I'll go over all of the different types of automation needed to keep insane project scope high (via ELMS Learning Network) while keeping teams light weight and small. This will be a case study with practical examples of how you can use the following to automate all the things and eliminate the human race people grrr... no that was right, people.

Discover a strategy for ensuring successful outcomes of Drupal projects of any size. "We don't have to manage our Drupal projects differently; Drupal allows us to manage them in different and more efficient ways" is an important statement. In addition to being a powerful Web Content Management System, Drupal is an incredible development framework allowing you to use thousands of existing tools (modules) to speed the development of your projects.

Omni channel communications can help school communities build effective, authentic relationships by engaging students and community members in real-time across multiple platforms. Explore how you can leverage affordable, open source technologies like Drupal to create innovative channel campaigns that foster community building and support strategic goals.

In this session, you’ll learn about:

Drupal Development is a specialty, so is Drupal Project Management.

Whether you are a seasoned PM new to Drupal or have just been volunteered to manage a project in your 'spare time,' what do you need to know about Drupal to help you manage projects more successfully?

Presented previously at NYC Camp and Drupalcamp Atlanta in 2014, join Blink Reaction Drupal Evangelist Ray Saltini as he guides participants through a practical and insightful disscussion around this critical topic.

This session will introduce you to:

Team leaders embarking on new web projects need a clear path forward and a high-level vision of the project’s goals and measures of success in order to continue to move forward efficiently.  Gathering website development teams, content creators and content consumers together and building consensus within a prescribed timeframe can be challenging!  Managing the expectations of all groups is critical to the success of the project.

After inheriting a derelict project, we managed to diagnose all of the structural issues within the site, and rebuilt it as a functional medical data repository. We will investigate the process of rehabilitate a functional and working data platform from the ashes of a failed project. We will discuss, with specific examples, techniques, resources and problems that have been encountered while developing this application:
- Performing an audit of the site and determining the viability of a project.
- Identifying core modifications and correcting them.

You build a site, set it up, and everything's going fine. Then usage increases, the sites starts to lag, and you (and/or your customer) are looking at tremendously expensive server upgrades… That's how it works, right?

It doesn't have to be that way.

What is all that technology hosts advertise? And what can you, the Drupal developer/designer, look for to get the best speed for your sites?

Speed is of paramount importance when choosing a host. Research shows that a 1 second delay in page-loading time can cost a site 7% of conversions. (That's $375,000/year for a site with 100,000 hits per month and an average sale of $75.) Our tests show that even some of the world's top Drupal hosts do not have optimal speed on their home pages.