A high-level discussion of how WordPress has incorporated itself into a Drupal-centric campus for web development. Let’s chat about how to leverage WordPress and its strengths with a pre-established CMS and culture, how to build trust and value in WordPress, and the benefits and challenges that WordPress brings to an established CMS campus environment. The goals of this session are to: educate on a Drupal CMS environment and its pros/cons. evaluate Drupal challenges and where WordPress fits this need. present a case study on how WordPress was implemented. challenges, issues, and considerations on incorporating WordPress into an already-established web environment. future directions to consider for WP usage and initiatives.

1. Implementing WordPress in a Drupal-
Majority Institutional Environment
Eric Scott Sembrat
Learning
from Drupal

2. Hi! I’m Eric.

3. Eric Scott Sembrat
Web Manager @ College of Engineering
President @ Atlanta Drupal User’s Group
Track Chair @ Drupal Association
Graduate Student @ Georgia State University
twitter: @esembrat
web: webbeh.com

4. Thanks for
having me!
Please ask questions at any time!
I will answer questions at the end.

5. Today
Let’s focus on:
• Drupal Education: A primer on Drupal as a CMS.
• Drupal Challenges: Challenges with using Drupal.
• Selling WordPress: Fitting WP into a culture.
• Incorporation: A case study from Georgia Tech.
• Learning from Drupal: Takeaways from using Drupal.

6. Drupal
Education

8. Drupal’s Reputation
When you hear Drupal,
what do you think of?

10. About that chart…
There’s a better way!
To properly articulate the challenges and benefits from
both WordPress and Drupal.
This chart doesn’t do either CMS justice.

11. Drupal vs. WordPress

12. Drupal vs. WordPress
This is Drupal.

13. Drupal vs. WordPress
Email Field
Entity Form
WYSIWYG
Editor
RulesFlag
Namefield

14. Drupal vs. WordPress

15. Drupal vs. WordPress
Your Drupal workflow
can look like this.

16. Drupal vs. WordPress

17. Drupal vs. WordPress
Or, it can look like this
(and be beautiful).

18. Drupal vs. WordPress

19. Drupal vs. WordPress
This is WordPress.

20. Drupal vs. WordPress
Contact Form A
Contact Form+
Contact Form 10
Contact Form XP
YAContact Form

21. Drupal’s Design
Drupal is designed to mimic OOP.
• Plugins (modules) serve a primary purpose and are
meant to be modular, like a lego brick.
• Plugins are widely inter-compatible and inter-
connected.
• Drupal rarely has packaged deployments of ‘finished’
objects.
• Photo galleries, etc.
• There are exceptions.

22. Drupal’s Design
Modular structure inherits
complexity.
• Like with WordPress, some modules doing a particular
task work better than others.
• The key is to find the winning combinations to
complete a task given specific requirements.
• Drupal itself is built with modular structure in mind.
• Users, content types (posts, pages, and so on), and
vocabularies are extendible and customizable.

23. Let’s Not Dwell.
That’s Drupal in a nutshell.
So, consider that its users and site builders are used to
component-based design and development.
Why and how would WordPress fit into an environment
built around this?

24. Before we continue…
It’s worth noting that Drupal is an
incredibly strong and powerful tool.
As is worth noting, Drupal has a steep learning curve.
It is one of the only systems I’ve seen that can construct
complex workflows with zero lines of custom code*.
(not counting theme styling - never count CSS out)

25. Bragging Incoming
A few examples of what Drupal is
good for.
Beyond your content-heavy and complex school and
college websites.

29. Drupal
Challenges

30. A Common Query
“I need you to build a website for {X}
quickly and have it do {A}, {B}, and
{C} by {totally unrealistic rushed
timeline}. How can we accomplish
this?”

31. We can build it!
Drupal could do this.
But, is it the right tool for a barebones website that really
only does two to three primary things?
Is it worth the resources to build up a complex website
that actually does very little?

32. Drupal Multisite
Drupal can do multisite.
But the setup and provisioning of a new site within a
multisite is a largely manual and base-level process.

33. Security Updates
Updates can be sorta automatic.
Drupal relies heavily on scripting and bash command
language for server/low-level interaction.
Updates can be delivered automatically via drush, an
optional service for command-line interaction with
websites.
Otherwise, the update process are prone to mistakes.

34. Drupal out-of-the-box
By default, Drupal comes
preconfigured to do only the basics.
This is meant to reduce bloat, as site maintainers can
build their web application from a fairly small footprint
or foundation.
This is somewhat mitigated by distributions, but the
upgrade paths for distribution components has been
uneven.

35. What about Drupal 8?
Drupal 8 fixes some of these issues,
but also adds additional complexity.
The latest major release of Drupal (November 2015)
added Entity Reference, Views, and other key
components into Drupal core.
However, these additional changes do not entirely
mitigate the above issues.

36. Thinking out loud.
Is there a more user-friendly way?
Drupal will likely never meet the demands of website-as-
a-service without dedicated staffing and significant
resources to scaffold development and design to aid
non-technical web users.

37. Selling
WordPress

38. Selling WordPress
So, how to sell WordPress to the
campus community?
While your use-case may differ from standards, there are
a number of areas where approaching a secondary CMS
like WordPress can benefit your community as a whole.

39. WordPress & Workflow
WordPress doesn’t have a Views
replacement.
Views is a key backbone of Drupal and is the foundation
of most workflow state, content reusability, and
information architecture practices in Drupal.
Rather than looking at WordPress to replace, there’s
areas where WordPress truly shines brighter.

40. Fitting WordPress In
WordPress augments, not replaces,
the primary CMS.
WordPress provides a niche for web development on
campus fitting use-cases to which Drupal is not an ideal
fit.
• Small, brochure-ware websites.
• Plugin-focused website applications.
• Brand-independent websites.
• Ease-of-use for web content creation.

41. Your Users
Institutional users could be already
using other CMSs.
With WordPress.com, wix.com being prevalent and
pervasive across the web, your users have likely
experimented with (or are using) off-campus solutions.
Choosing an on-campus WordPress installation may
come at the benefit of on-campus resources, plugins, or
connections.

42. WordPress MU
Suitable service-level offering.
The usage of MultiUser (MU) in WordPress allows for
the CMS to act as a service, where users can self-
provision new subsites.

43. The Details
Overall, WordPress works because
due to its content creation tools.
From a built-in flexible WYSIWYG/filter and continually-
expanding oEmbed support, building engaging content
on WordPress is easier than its competition.

44. CMS-Agnostic Design
Proposes the possibility of CMS-
agnostic design.
Building institutional web applications, themes, and add-
ons for more than just one platform.
• Scale for adaptability and flexibility.
• Scale for proprietary/internal/legacy systems.

45. Incorporating
WordPress:
A Case Study

47. Campus Branding
Georgia Tech’s branding cascades
top-down from Drupal.
However, this branding becomes unsustainable as you
drop into small, personalized websites that may not
leverage Drupal or even a CMS.
Cases include student, organizations, faculty/staff,
event-related, and special websites.

52. Accessibility?
Each example has accessible and
responsive design issues.
These small websites have only a few options for
replacing their outdated websites:
• Hire a Drupal developer.
• Learn Drupal themselves.
• Hire a graduate student to build something*.
(results may vary)

53. Why not WordPress?
WordPress was already being used
on campus.
Users on campus could use virtual web hosting to install
any content management system, including WordPress.
WordPress was the source of many outdated and
deprecated websites and security vulnerabilities.
WordPress was not being centrally leveraged.

54. The Move
The move from decentralized to
centralized WordPress.
An opt-in WordPress multisite to allow users to trade off
complete control of plugins, themes, configuration
for automated security updates, a centrally-maintained
campus theme, and CAS/SSO support (among others).

55. Results?
Thinking about web not as a single
CMS but an ecosystem.
Not just Drupal, and not just WordPress.

56. Results
A quick discussion on the results of
WordPress at Georgia Tech.

57. Learning
from Drupal

58. Lessons for WP
Drupal’s OO-design can bring many
good habits to web development.
Despite being more intensive and requiring more work to
bring up-to-speed, we can learn a lot from Drupal’s
design.

59. 1. Object Coupling
Entity-to-entity connections are
crucial.
Establishing an information architecture is crucial to
making sure your website custom data grows
organically along with the content.
Don’t Repeat Yourself.

60. 1. Object Coupling
Who inherits who? Who extends
who?
By cataloguing this beforehand (or as early as possible),
you can determine the best way to re-use and connect
data across data types.

61. 2. Components
Component-level design is superb in
an ever-changing environment.
Building elements component-by-component allows
them to be switched out with new iterations or updates,
replace with a new workflow, or even connect with an
external data source entity.
The goal here should be to build custom components
with chunking into individual LEGO blocks in mind.

62. 2. Components
Benefits of LEGO blocks can be
massive.
What happens when your news/event service changes?
When your institution revamps its style guide?
When a new faculty information system is online?
When legal requirements necessitate a change?

63. 3. Build for End-Users
Content Editing should be left to the
content editors.
Streamline the content-creation process as much as
possible.
Abstract out any HTML markup chunks into system
components to simplify the user experience for your
editors.

64. 3. Build for End-Users
Free up your time for the fun
projects.

65. Good Luck!

66. In Summation
There’s immense value in gauging
benefits in both Drupal and
WordPress.
Your mission is to combine the best facets of both
worlds to create a website which is usable both for your
end-users and the content editors.
Do this, and you’ll be unstoppable.

67. Questions?