Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Trial by fire

My first major Drupal site was for a small business owner in the Boston area. In our initial discussions, we’d talked about doing a simple refresh of her existing site, and I sold her on the idea of doing it in Drupal. We discussed the site map, and the way that content was going to be organized, but she hadn’t developed any of the new content yet. As was my process at the time, I worked up a proposed layout for the homepage and an interior page, and she approved it with no problems. Look and feel established, I started up an installation of Drupal and started creating the content types that would organize the site’s content, working with generic placeholder text.

The site map we’d originally agreed on was fairly simple:

1. A Services page that listed all the services her company offered;

2. An Events page that listed upcoming events (this would require an event content type)

3. A News page that listed current news (this would require a news content type)

4. An About page that listed all the staff and what they brought to the company;

5. A Resources page that listed resources for her clients;

6. A contact form that would allow users to get in touch with her for consultations.

All of this seemed pretty straightforward. When the content started coming in, it turned out that the Services page was actually several different services, each with fourteen pages of descriptive content. The staff bios were two pages long. Events could be categorized, and had to be navigated, in three separate ways. ...