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A Kent approach to Drupal Awesomeness

Kent's publicity factory
Code & Development

Presenter:

Additional Presenters:  Mark Fendley Matthew Bull

Track

Code & Development

Experience

Intermediate

Focus

Decision Maker | Project Manager | Developer

A Kent approach to Drupal Awesomeness

45 minutes (+15 minutes Q&A)

Room:

tags

enterprise | Higher Education | content | duplication | kent | Xtags | XML | news | print | web

We will take you on a magical journey through code and print using Drupal as our vessel of discovery. Ok, maybe not, but we have been busy working with Drupal to decouple our data from where and how it is presented.

The University of Kent has a history of using Dreamweaver as our main publishing platform for web. We used it for publishing news, the online prospectus, events, pretty much everything. This led us to a situation where we found ourselves with 200,000 pages of content, much of which being duplicated and leading our web editor to the verge of breakdown.

We realised that it would prove to be difficult to migrate the entire site to Drupal, especially as each departmental site needs to be autonomous, whilst acting as a whole.

The key to Drupal's success at Kent was to focus on the quick wins of publicity, programmes and profiles. We have taken an approach to introduce "Content Factories", customised Drupal installations with a single task - managing reusable content. This decoupling of content from presentation has provided us with a single source of information for web, print, and mobile content.

Through a variety of delivery methods, this content is distributed out to the various channels for consumption.

Come along and find out what we've been up to over the past 18 months, our future plans, and let us know if you can do it better.

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