We've made serious efforts over many years of building content managed websites to ensure that the sites we build are sustainable for our clients. It's easy for all teams involved in digital development to generate exciting ideas and features.
When we first started using Agile to manage our projects, we were delighted with the idea of valuing "working software over comprehensive documentation". In waterfall project management, documentation was used all too often as a way of simply mitigating risk. So reams of paper were wasted, as documentation bloated and became unmanageable in any practical sense.
Last weekend saw the best ever Drupal Camp in Brighton. A huge turnout and a great array of sessions and speakers all brilliantly organised by the team. I had many highlights but here are a just a couple of tasty takeaways that stuck.
I recently wrote about the excellent Entity Registration module that enables you to set up registration forms for your event in doubel-quick time.
Recently, we had a requirement to create another sign up form, this time for protected file downloads - a form was required to gather contact details, email addresses and so on before enabling users to view protected content. We could have used Entity Form for this but we opted for Webform as this is already being used on the site.
We've used a lot of approaches to time tracking over the years. Everything gets noted down so can we supply reports on time to our clients and we can learn how to better monitor and improve our time usage. But it's always a challenge managing time recording across multiple platforms and devices.While we use ActiveCollab to log and share hours on projects with clients and Hesk for ticketing, we wanted a better way of recording hours for internal tasks.
I recently attended an inspirational Open Source event. This was kindly hosted by Brighton company Omnis Systems. It was really inspiring to see the range of Open Source systems available as alternatives to the usual proprietary offerings.
A central theme of the day was privacy - despite all the recent revelations over the past couple of years, I think we're still unable to grasp the full meaning of the shift towards proprietary systems on the cloud and what this means for privacy.
We've written a huge number of forms over the years (mainly using PHP or Symfony) and can pretty much produce most customisable forms that are required. But using Webform within Drupal has been a real game-changer for us. While we'll still create custom code for some specific form tasks, I'd say that Webform answers at least 50% of the typical use cases that face us on a daily basis.
Sereno Charity Websites & Intranets
Sereno builds bespoke websites & intranets for charities in Drupal & WordPress.
