Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) that can be used to build various types of websites and applications. External Services at the European Bioinformatics Institute uses Drupal to manage 33 portals, 23 EU project sites, and 10 internal EBI sites. Drupal provides tools for content authors to create, edit, and manage content through a web interface, and also gives developers flexibility to customize sites through modules, themes, and code. ES supports use of Drupal through virtual machines, version control, and development resources.

1. Drupal at the EBI
Bren Vaughan
Web Coordinator, External Services
bren@ebi.ac.uk

2. Topics
• What is Drupal?
• What can you do with it?
• What are ES doing with it?
• Drupal for content authors
• Drupal for developers
• ES setup
• Considerations
• How can ES support me?
• What is this Group for?

3. What is Drupal?
• Drupal is a completely
free, open source content
management system (CMS)
• Drupal's many features and
add-ons make it highly
customisable and allow it to
be used for a wide variety of
website needs
• Drupal’s flexibility allows easy
creation of highly functional
custom modules

4. What is a CMS?
• A CMS is a tool that enables a
variety of (centralised)
technical and (de-centralised)
non technical staff to create,
edit, manage and finally
publish (in a number of
formats) a variety of content
(such as text, graphics, video,
documents etc), whilst being
constrained by a centralised
set of rules, process and
workflows that ensure
coherent, validated electronic
content.

5. Why use Drupal?
• High performance
• SEO friendly right out of the box
• Massive, active development
community
• A CMS and an effective application
framework
• User and Role-based permission
system
• Theming engine separates content
completely from presentation
• Free

6. How does it work?
• Centralised installation
• Accessed through a browser
• Content stored in a database
• Content served dynamically
• Content re-used and
displayed as desired

7. How does it work?

8. What can you do
with it?
• Community web portals
• Corporate web sites
• Intranets
• Personal web sites or blogs
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

9. Who uses it?
• The White House, NASA, DivX,
Ubuntu, MTV, Sony, Warner
Bros, 20th Century Fox, Comic
Relief, Mensa, Various
Governments, Amnesty
International, The Economist,
Le Figaro, General Motors,
The World Bank, Lucas Arts,
NVidia, Procter & Gamble,
Intel, The Grammys, Monty
Python, BBC, AT&T, Stanford
University, Reuters, CNN,
Mattel, Emmys, MIT, Harvard,
Michael Jackson, Google,
Virgin, Nokia, Symantec,
Java.net, Twitter, World

10. What are ES doing
with it?
• 33 Drupal portals
• 23 EU project sites
• 10 EBI sites & internal sites
• Project management sites
• User informations sites
• Web applications

11. Drupal for content
authors
• Web based forms
• Different content types
• WYSIWYG editor
• Populate menus
• Access control
• Publication workflow
• Reusable content

12. Drupal for content authors

13. Drupal for content authors

15. Drupal for content authors

20. Drupal for developers
• Themes
• Blocks of information
• Large flexible API
• Custom modules
• Hooks

21. Themes
• Skin your site the way you
want
• Create regions within pages to
insert pieces of content
• Style the same content
differently in different areas of
the site
• Keep the functional code of
the site separate from the
presentation of content

24. mysite.info
mysite.module

25. ES setup
• Virtual machines
• Instances
• Drush
• Makefiles

26. Virtual machines
• EBI
• Portals
• E-learning
• ES

27. Workflow
• Use Drush and makefiles to
download Drupal, contributed
modules, custom code,
themes, libraries etc.
• Check custom code into
version control system
• Check out from version
control system onto virtual
machines
• Local -> Dev -> Stage -> Prod

28. Considerations
• Drupal 6 vs Drupal 7
• Development time/cost vs
benefit.
• Maintenance / upgrades
• WYSIWYG is not Word
• Custom modules / coding
standards / security
• Website redesign

29. How can ES support
me?
• Contact es-request@ebi.ac.uk
• Use our existing setup
• Makefiles generated
• Resources

30. What is this group
for?
• Inform about Drupal
• Share experiences / code
• Exchange ideas about
approaches
• Avoid redundancy of effort
• Learn more!