Your Drupal Gardens Website

Your Drupal website will initially be a sandbox where you learn to build using the Drupal content management system (CMS) platform.

We will create a site on the first day of class and you are encouraged to begin experimenting and exploring right away.

I am giving you full administrative permissions on your site, (which is a subdomain site) but I'd like you not to add themes or modules until we discuss in class. When one one person adds a theme or module, it adds it for all. I'd like to avoid any confusion, so please work with the modules and themes that I provide and if you feel you need something, ask me first and I'll OK for you to add it or I will add it.

Each week will we explore a particular aspect of site building and administration of these sites in roughly this order:

  • The Dashboard/Content (status and type)
  • Structure
    1. Blocks, menus, taxonomy
    2. Simple Views
    3. Content Types
    4. Taxonomy
  • Appearance
    1. Theme
    2. Brand
    3. Layout
    4. Styles
    5. Advanced Features
    6. CSS
  • People (Users)
    1. Manage users
    2. Permissions
    3. Roles
  • Modules
  • Configuration
  • Reports

We'll look at each of the features above in some systematic order, but you'll need to explore on your own and not wait for each topic to be addressed in class.

You can begin right away, but by midterm, you should have a course website that is focused on the content, audience, and purposes of this course. We'll discuss this in more detail at the appropriate time, but you'll use the content of chapters one and two in the text to begin to define your audience and rhetorical purposes. This website, in other words, will become a workspace for this course and display all of your work for the course--blogs, assignments, research, and other things you find relevant to this course.

This Drupal site will be an important part of the grade for this course. In the end, your site will include an "About" page that provides a well-informed analysis of your own site--but most importantly, it will provide and organized arrangement of your work, assignments, and research for this course.

So what should your Drupal site do? What should be its functions? What is going to be its main purpose and focus? What questions will your readers/users have as they come to the site and how will you answer them?

Each student will need to explore think about these questions on their own, but the following set of requirements applies to all the sites for this project.

  1. Use of main page, pathway pages, information pages (see chapters 3, 4, and 6)
  2. A clear and appropriate branding concept for the site
  3. A consistent tone and personality that fits the audience and its expectations
  4. A constant and implicit reliance on concepts, techniques, and ideas from the course text.
  5. Letting Go of the Words should be open on your desk nearly every time you work on the site and your About Page should provide a site report that makes frequent reference to ideas and strategies found on specific pages of this text.
  6. A well-written report on the site--from you to me or others interested in learning what makes a good site--is a significant component of this project. It should, in every case, be included as an extra component to your About Us page. The first paragraph of such a page may follow the genre conventions of About Us pages--but an extended section should constitute your full report on the site.
  7. You might think of this Drupal site as an organized portfolio of your experience in this course. It will contain all of your work--organized and clearly navigable--but other thoughts and research as well. You will not need to copy your blogs that you do at this site over t your own site. But you may certainly blog on your own site in ways that are meaningful to you.

What is required on the site?

  • A learning section that includes an annotated, organized list of external sites that have helped you to learn Drupal (there are tons of these so you need to be selective and thoughtful about your list)
  • All of the work you do for this course (except the blog that you do on this course site).
  • Direct links to your Rapidian articles.
  • Other content of some type. Examples might include a personal blog, extra technical papers you write, news items you've read relevant to this course, etc.
  • Almost all of the work that you do will be posted on both the course website and your own drupal site. I'll try to be clear about which content goes where. But finished products like the tech papers will go on both sites. The Rapidian articles will have an external link from your site, to the Rapidian.