Three associates and I want to integrate our individual Drupal websites so that a user can move fairly seamlessly between them. We're all new at Drupal, so our planned approach avoids "doing it the right way" by combining modules and database tables.
Rather, we plan on simply having each site's menu system include links to the other sites, and load the selected site via Iframes so that the overall user experience is more like that of a single, integrated system. We'll adopt a common theme for all sites, and pass the user id through the HTML call (and then process it via normal Drupal code) to avoid the need for more than one logon.
What are the negatives of this simple approach and are they so severe that a more traditional site-integration approach should be used?
To be honest, that sounds like a rather nasty can of worms you're looking at opening there. The mere mention of IFrames has me shuddering!
It seems to me like you'd be better off simply having one Drupal instance, with you and your associates as different content authors on the same site.
If you're looking at having the same theme across the three integrated sites, how will the users know which one they're on? And if the aim is to tightly integrate them, why not have the four of you simply contribute to the same core site?
If I had to make the decission, I would use the drupal multisite feature. You can even use the "single sign on" module to get all your users logged in to all sites. It is a bit of work, but I think it is well worth it.
Once you start throwing things into frames your users/visitors will loose the ability to bookmark the correct page. For example, if they find a page they like and book mark it, they will get 'www.site.com/index.php' rather than 'www.site.com/article/article.php?Id=12345'. When they come back, they'll be getting the default page of where the frame lives at rather than the expected page.
Since all three of your sites are based on the same data scheme, it would probably be better to 'do it right' the first time around rather than hacking something together that in the end will cause more headaches than solutions.
Good luck on your project and hope this helps some.
Related
For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.
Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So, I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).
After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.
So my question is: does Drupal get any better? Do you really have to use Views to display your content? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why? Is one better off sticking to a framework?
"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."
Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.
Try 6.
Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.
(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)
The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.
You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.
Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.
In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.
You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.
You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.
The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.
Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.
Well, I began to grow very tired of
the limitations of Wordpress - I
needed more control and flexibility
over my sites. So... I have recently
started using Drupal 7
Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.
If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.
You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.
As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.
As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.
Regards.
All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.
That's just the nature of the beast.
On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.
And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).
If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.
Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.
I'm going to be moving my website to a CMS in the coming months I'd I need some help on choosing an appropriate CMS. Many of the websites I've seen tend to say "use Drupal, hands down". However, my website truly doesn't have a need for commenting or community features. Its pages will need to be modified occasionally, but not extensively. My website will also consist of many programs, each with their own sub-pages and menus.
There are probably 25 people that will need access to the content on my website and will need the ability to update it.
I do like the idea of being able to tag and categorize the content, and the modular aspect of Drupal but is it really right for my website? If not, which CMS may fit my needs better?
It sounds like Drupal would be an excellent solution to your company's needs. I used to recommend WordPress for smaller, single-blog type sites, but now, even for those, I recommend Drupal because you can start small and scale up as your needs grow. It has a very dedicated community and there is a module for just about any need you may have.
I would agree with Drupal. The thing about Drupal is that you start out very small and add on as you need things. There is a ton of documentation, it is well coded, always being expanded on, good forum support, and free. It's the easiest to install, most problem free, and most maintainable CMS system I've seen so far.
You can turn Drupal commenting off with the press of a button, and if/when you decide to add onto your website, perhaps you want an ad rotator, more extensive user permissions, etc, etc, it is all already developed for you and ready to go.
I am not sure if Wordpress supports multiple users on a site.
The smallest you can go for a CMS is something like 10kCMS or the more popular TinyMCE
If it is something small I will go with WordPress as it is easily themed and extensible. There are a lot of community plugins and support. Their documentation is also fairly simple as they don't have a thousand of functions and stuff you need to remember and understand. With some creativity the basic functionality of WordPress is sufficient to solve almost all problems that might arise in small to mid-size website.
I also like Drupal, but you may consider Umbraco as well. http://umbraco.org/ I'd use Umbraco over Drupal if your team is stronger in .Net than PHP. (Really, I think that's a larger concern - what are your organization's strengths? Play to suit them. You are making a decision that will pave the way for many developers besides yourself, and business decisions of your company.) Both are extendable and open source so you can write your own modules/components to customize. It may be cleaner to import into Drupal tables than Umbraco, since it goes down to xslt files. (EDIT: This looks to be no longer the case in the new version - http://umbracohosting.com/umbraco-4---get-excited/one-cms-any-database) From a front end dev perspective, both offer great control of the final output.
From working on legacy stuff a lot, you may end up hiring interns to do the gruntwork. There's bound to be tons of inline tables and all sorts of un-reusable code in there, it may be easier to scrape the content manually and start w/clean markup for the content portions.
A client asked me to redesign her web site, built several years ago in WP by another developer. Although I've never worked with WP before, I'm pretty comfortable with html, css, and php, and I more or less understand how WP stores content and dynamically builds pages. But I'm wondering how to approach these challenges:
My client's site has about 75 pages. There are about 25 that are static (i.e. the content changes infrequently if at all; things like "about us" and "faqs") and there are about 50 pages that are more "blog-like", except that instead of posts, the content contains directory-type info (e.g. 12 DJs in the area) or event-related info (e.g. upcoming shows at local theaters). Both of these categories contain many sub (and sometimes sub-sub) categories (e.g. medical services > pediatric > kid allergy specialists) and the content updates fairly frequently.
I understand the difference in WP between "pages" and "posts". But I need to find out the best way to structure the static content. Should I just set up a parent/child hierarchy of pages, changing the permalinks to something that makes sense? Or is it better / easier to just build the static pages outside WP and somehow link to them from the common navigation?
As a web designer, I want to "wow" my client with a great design. While there are loads of wonderful WP themes available, I really need to create something unique. But I'm wary of breaking something, so what's the best way to take an existing theme and just tweak it enough to make it look a little different?
Finally, other than mounting a massive "copy and paste" effort when the new site is built, is there a way to transfer content from the original site to the new one?
By reading your question, it seems to me that choosing WP for this kind of website was a bad choice.
Redesigning it, though, won't be that hard if it's using page templates for pages.
And yes, there's a import/export tool in WP to tranfer content. (see administration panel)
I, really, advise you to read this great tutorial about creating WP themes.
I've a blog-like WP site myself (contains RPG development articles). Here's what I did. Nested static pages simply have parent-child hierarchy: /about/mingos - that's easy to understand and i value this kind of content organisation (personal opinion).
As for themes, there's a no-brainer tool that, while not exactly apt for real business, has the capability of letting you see how stuff will look in seconds, and can sometimes give you great ideas. It's called Artisteer and there's a demo on its site that you can have a look at. Try your design ideas with it, see how stuff will look like. I'm sure you can come up with some great ideas for a "wow" design :).
Exporting content, as Soufiane Hassou remarked, is possible from within the admin panel.
Don't rule out using categories to create your hierarchy. That way you'd get the benefit of cross categorization of DJs and venues by location to create a robust cross reference system. Pages don't get this benefit without extra work.
To make this in to a directory, though, is gonna either be heavy work on managing the pages or heavy work on creating a solution that will cross reference everything and bring the content together in a usable way on the front end.
Has anyone ever tried to integrate AspDotNetStorefront and Sitecore? I've been trying for the past couple of days to come up with a way to get the two systems to play nicely together, but it doesn't seem feasible from what I can tell. A couple issues I've run across so far:
Authentication between the two (AspDotNetStorefront has its own implementation, Sitecore just uses/extends .NET Membership)
The main DLL for AspDotNetStorefront is what pops up in the stack trace when I get yellow-screened, but that DLL is obfuscated so I can't figure out what the problem is.
The biggest issue is that we need to keep our existing AspDotNetStorefront application as an e-commerce backend and use Sitecore to do everything else. AspDotNetStorefront has a CMS as part of it, but it's really not an acceptable solution for anything but really basic content pages.
Any thoughts on how I might go about this?
EDIT:
I've decided to break this whole thing down into the different problems that I am facing at the moment and solve each one as efficiently as I know how. I'll detail the ones I have here and then update when I run into new ones.
Problem 1: Authentication between the two systems.
This one isn't too bad actually if you're knowledgeable about forms authentication tickets, which I wasn't at the time but am learning quickly enough. As long as the two systems share the same encryption info, it's easy enough to pass information back and forth between them using cookies as stated below in the accepted answer. The other kicker is that I needed to set the CustomerGUID in the AspDotNetStorefront Customer table to be the user ID from the Sitecore user tables (standard ASP.NET membership). So far this approach seems to work pretty well (I'm still in the proof of concept stage at the moment.
Another thing to keep in mind if you ever need to attempt this is that AspDotNetStorefront comes with a web service that you can use to basically do anything you need. Since they use the same encryption keys, I am able to log in on the storefront side using this service more securely than just passing over clear text passwords (I had to write the method myself, I don't believe it comes standard, if I am mistaken please let me know). Although I doubt it's a huge deal since it all happens server side anyways.
Problem 2: Getting at the product data
This one was a little more troublesome. The aforementioned web service has a few issues I've had difficulty working around. However, since the databases are going to be on the same server, I simply decided that since all I really need is the price and ID I would go ahead and set the ProductGUID column of each product in the Storefront database to match the Sitecore item ID of the corresponding item in the Sitecore database. This way I just need a quick query to grab the ProductID and price information which is only used in a few places. Everything else is going to be housed in Sitecore.
If anyone has anything to add feel free, as far as I can tell from Google, no one has actually done this before, so I'm having a lot of trouble finding resources on this particular topic.
UPDATE:
The integration is in fact possible and our site has been up for a week and a half now with very few integration related problems. This isn't something I recommend doing really on a personal level, but it is in fact possible to pull off.
I know ASPDotNetStorefront and other CMS systems (but not Sitecore). If I was approaching this, I would probably start simple and create a custom URL structure for sitecore 'content' pages that ASPDNSF would direct to Sitecore to handle. [possibly replacing the existing topics system in ASPDNSF]. So, for example: a URL such as www.domain.com/p-1234-aproductpage.aspx would be handled by ASPDNSF whereas www.domain.com/content/123/a-content-page would get sent to Sitecore to render. This is a straightforward web.config edit.
Security sharing across the systems should be possible across the same domain as the cookie information will be available (you should be able to create some code in Sitecore using the ASPDNSFCommon.dll and a cast of HttpContext.Current.User into a AspDotNetStorefrontPrincipal class to detect if a customer is logged in)
Another way to approach the problem would be to write a function that retrieved Sitecore content from the database based on a URL id and then write an ASPDNSF XML template to use the function to retrieve this content based on the URL. For example, you could create a custom URL structure in ASPDNSF such as www.domain.com/sc-1234-sitecore-content-item.aspx which is sent to your custom code; 1234 is used as the sitecore content id and the XML template retrieves the content and renders it on screen.
This second approach has the advantage of using Sitecore for all non-product content management while keeping the live application in ASPDNSF. Also one set of design templates and all your security issues go.
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Concerning pages that build a web application:
Lately, I have found myself creating web pages that are simpler than the ones I used to. Before, I would try to jam as much functionality into a single page as I could to prevent from having lots of pages.
I am starting to realize that this was just making things way more complex, convoluted, and confusing than it had to be. Why not have more pages? I think the reason that I was doing this was because I didn't want the user to have to browse to other pages; just to have all the functionality they needed on a single page.
Well, these good intentions turned into an overly confusing interface for the user and very unmanageable source code. I am a new developer and I am trying to be very reflective of what I am doing so that I can improve. If it makes a difference, I am developing in ASP.net (though these are probably considerations for any platform).
My questions are:
Am I overthinking these things?
Has anyone else found themselves doing this?
Where is the happy medium?
There is no expert who can give you a rule that works in all places at all times. I have been known in my industry for years for "easy" interfaces and we've won significant amounts of business for it (as well as 5 "Best in Class" awards). I have also had people within my company and outside of it tell me - for years - that they like my work but wish that I would "jazz it up" with more graphics and such. What always amazes me is how little connection people see between the two.
So...a few rules of thumb:
A page should do one main thing.
A page may well have multiple links related to the main thing
Menuing and link layout should be consistent across pages
Simpler is better than more complex
Pages should be visually appealing and inviting
Rule 4 is more important than rule 5.
For example, my product provides an interface that lets people define classes and events to be displayed in a calendar. I could have one page that lets you Review, Add, Update, Delete and Edit the classes. Indeed, in some simpler areas, I've used the gridview to let people manage everything in a grid. However, classes have too much information to do this and still follow the rules above.
So,
The main idea is: "Here is a list of classes for this location"
The links are "Add New" shown above and to the right of the grid, Change and Delete are links within each row. This is consistent across the app.
Menuing for the system as a whole is always across the right/top. Nothing else appears on the class/event page except for standard elements common to all pages (a logo, a header, a footer).
The grid is nicely styled but there are no spurious graphics (4,5,6)
A few last things about UIs and graphic design.
First, develop your own vision and be consistent across pages and apps.
Second, do not be afraid of simplicity.
Next, when soliciting advice from others keep in mind that you do not want their advice - you want their impressions: you want to understand the way they perceive the interface. Advice is sometimes good but, more often than not, actually harmful. In my experience, everyone thinks that they are a UI expert.
When you do your hallway (or formal) useability testing you should discount almost all advice to the effect that "you should make that stand out more." As you'll see, it will quickly become "and that," "and that," "and the other." If you follow this advice, you'll end up with a mess due to Brittingham's first rule of design: If everything is important than nothing is. (There you go: when explaining why you can't make someone stand out more, just tell them that "it violates Brittingham's first rule of design!")
Hope this helps!
You hit the nail on the head. Use the KISS principle. (Keep It Simple Stupid)
I've done this in the past as well and not only does it make for a hideous UI, but confusing as to what operations you can do on the page due to having too much functionality. I've often found in testing that I did not have enough checks to see if the user could perform a certain operation based on the state of the data.
It's easy enough in ASP.Net to write several pages that do simple tasks and then link them together with Response.Redirect or Server.Transfer. Now all I try to achieve on any given page is what the design specs say. So if my page is just a search page, that's all I give. If the user wants to see the details of an item that was returned in the search, then I send them to an itemDetails.aspx page.
You've broken a wall that most software developers have, the one that was blocking your view on usability before. A lot of developers don't really think about it and try to make it easier for them by stuffing functionality in one window, web page or whatever.
The thing is once you start designing software from the user's point of view, i.e. making it easier, several things start to become clear. One is the issue of code maintenance, that code is easily more managable to work on if you don't stuff everything in one giant class or whatever travesty you've been doing. The other is usability itself, that you start to think how the user is actually using your application through the graphical interface. Third is avoiding requirements or scope creep where you stop developing functionality that the user doesn't need.
We as users want simplicity partly because we don't want to spend most of our time muddling through a bad UI when we can get our work done faster with a simple and slick UI. That makes it for us software developers the right thing to do, to think through your design on all levels... that and specs always lie.
Definitely agree: most attempts at writing pages/forms that do too much have resulted in
bugs and rewrites. Problems occur with keeping all parts valid/synchronized,
excess managing of users' expectations ("I've entered a bill number here and clicked "find person" there but it gives an error message. Why?") when the two are logically separate. These questions cannot arise if only the valid options are visible,
Formatting/layout issues: In ASP.NET pages, trying to layout independent User Controls turns out to be a nightmare ("But we really want all the buttons vertically aligned!" in separate user controls. Good luck with that.)
I'd consider webpages with more than one functionality only if the target audience consists of domain experts, i.e. people that need lots of functionality on one page for better productivity (think data-entry or financial software with lots of variables).
Even then, most of the time, it's possible separate pages into single units.
No
Yes - me
I found the happy medium was to use Masterpages, and using it in a way that was familiar to IFrames. That I could have a lots of functionality combined well together. There is a more interesting way of doing this with WPF/Silverlight called Prism
The amount of functionality on a page is usually not determined by you but by your customer. If the customer demands a single page to update some VeryComplexObject, you're likely to end up with an aspx page that has a significant number of lines. Main reason is that you simply have a lot of event handlers for all actions on the page.
Whether that page is complex is entirely up to you. You should always attempt to make your code-behind file as simple and clean as possible. Some suggestions in that direction:
Move all business code to another application layer.
Use ObjectDataSource for providing data to data-bound controls such as ListView, GridView, Repeater, ... Delegating loading of data to a dedicated object prevents a lot of overhead in your aspx.cs file.
Another suggestion is to use user controls to implement portions of your page. You would usually only do this when you can reuse the user control, but it can also be of great help reducing page complexity (both of your code-behind file as well as your aspx).
Sometimes I think we are all guilty of forgetting just who it is that we develop our applications for. It isn't always easy as a developer to be able to take a step back and have a look at your application as a user might do so. This is why big companies employee hundreds of people to do this for them and they don't always get it right.
Usability is a massive subject but it is defiantly something that all developers need to keep in mind. It has taken me a long time to learn this but when tackling any development task I always try to think about how my users are going to interact with what I am writing. This will make a difference to all levels of your development.
I would suggest reading Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. This book won't take you an age to read and it puts across some fantastic ideas that can help you to develop applications that are much easier to use and understand.
I always find that once I have thought about the user experience the decisions about what my web pages are going to do and how they are going to interact are much easier to make.
Maybe you should ask the people who are using your site. Or better yet, just watch people use your site. I think that would tell you if your site is designed well, or if you need to change it.