Away with these hierarchies! Keep it simple! Mobile first!

A presentation at DrupalCamp Berlin in in Berlin, Germany by Jutta Horstmann

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Relaunching a large organization’s website is a challenge in terms of restructuring the content, migrating the assets, providing content access restrictions and editing workflows and finally delivering the content to the user in a pleasant and intuitive way. On the other hand, a relaunch allows us to simplify structures, flatten hierarchical content and supply the user with relevant content according to their needs and context. How does Drupal support us with such a task?

The examples for this session come from relaunching the website of Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University: https://h-brs.de. This talk focuses on content inventory, content architecture, content migration and mobile first content delivery. Based on our experiences with trying to achieve the perfect editor’s experience in Drupal (see my other talk on that topic), this is all about simplifying instead of over-optimization.

My session addresses the following topics:

  • Content inventory and content architecture – how Drupal helps with simplifying and flattening formerly hierarchical content
  • Information architecture instead of information overflow – leading the user to the relevant stuff
  • Content and file migrations – when, why and how to perform them
  • Some simple node form tweaks for a better editor experience
  • How the paragraph module made our life much easier (with some caveats)
  • Editing content in a responsive, non-hierarchical world – where will it show up? How will it look like?
  • Searching and finding content – some notes on Search API, Solr, and full-text indexing of files