Limbering Up Drupal with Flexible Layouts, WYSIWYG Templates, & More

Time: 
07/22/2015 - 11:15-07/22/2015 - 12:00
Room: 
Balcony B
Experience level: 
Advanced
Session Track: 

Site Building

Learn how to leverage the flexibility of Drupal to deliver experiences in nearly limitless ways. See how you are able to do this—often without code and relying on the ever-expanding universe of contributed modules.

Drupal’s content editing experience is key for content administrators who use it to publish information daily. But many Drupal sites suffer from either too many content types, with too many restrictions on what content can do within them — or too few content types, with too much reliance on admins having an advanced knowledge of HTML and/or a developer they can contact when iffy formatting code breaks a page.

You can limber up your Drupal sites by embracing configuration that empowers your content administrators to change page layouts, embed retina-friendly images, use pre-configured content templates for styled content in WYSIWYGs, and drop in pre-styled elements from your style guide, laid out in handy dropdowns.

This session will demo:

  • Making your layouts flexible with Panels
  • Offering up retina-friendly images in WYSIWYGs, without hurting performance, by configuring the Breakpoint and Picture modules for use with embedded images
  • Making image placement easier for content admins by providing image layout templates that include left/right floating, sizing, and styled captions
  • Creating content templates that content admins can select to drop in pre-formatted text and styles — e.g. “Pullquote with Credit” or “Progress Callout with Date”
  • Plus more administrative modules for easier linking, content browsing, and bulk updates.

We’ll also discuss our strategy on when to create fields and when to create WYSIWYG templates, with the goal of promoting design and UX consistency across your site.

This session will be presented by Clay Marshall and Kat Kuhl, who specialize in creating intuitive, powerful Drupal experiences for clients that have included the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Slides for Limbering Up Drupal can be found here.