Kevin's Blog

Having worked on new ways of doing layouts with the Paragraphs module and worked with Institute Communications on the development of a new version of the Georgia Tech web theme, I realized that there was still one component of website visual design that I had yet to address:  a visual building block toolkit for content creators and editors.  Custom layouts are a part of this puzzle, but they do not address the need for custom styled headings, buttons, introductory text, etc. that need to be part of the actual content of a page.

The challenge here is that you want to make these custom styles easy to use and easy to maintain.  The most obvious approach is to add them to your chosen WYSIWYG editor, but figuring out how to do that can be tricky.  Here at Georgia Tech we use Drupal and in turn the preferred Drupal editor, CKEditor.  This is helpful, as there are lots of guides out there for extending both Drupal and CKEditor, but it can take time to dig through them and figure out how to make it all work.

All blog entries reflect the opinions of the author and have not been expressly endorsed by the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts or the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Here in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts (IAC), we have at least 150 websites to take care of when you include all of the test and dev sites along with a few servers that house custom web applications, and of that number 35 are Drupal sites, 22 of which I have some level of direct responsibility for maintaining.

Even at twenty-two sites, it's very challenging to keep up with the required regular maintenance, and with my being the first IAC college-wide web developer, there were no standards in place before I arrived.  So, I kind of had my work cut out for me.  On one hand, I had something of a clean slate on which to develop plans for handling everything into the future.  On the other hand, I had to do a lot of ground work just to get a good sense of what was out there and what state it was in.