See our Calendar for meeting times and locations.
January 2, 2020
Terrill Thompson gave us an update on the accessibility sprint held in December and the number of issues fixed. The group talked for a few minutes about their experiences and how to approach future sprints.
Heather Wozniak shared the recently redesigned School of Drama website and talked about the process they used, challenges, and successes.
Dan Druliner shared the recently redesigned Finance Transformation website and how he accomplished the polished design with a quick turnaround.
February 6, 2020
Veronica Brace showed us how to do A/B testing in Drupal 8 using the A/B Test JS and A/B Test UI modules.
Slides are available here, though they are quite brief. Questions can be emailed to vbrace@uw.edu.
The group brainstormed discussion topics for future meetings. We decided on topics for the next few months. Many of these will be roundtable format, where a few people will talk for 5 minutes about what they are doing in that area, followed by group discussion.
- March 5 - Site Search (solr, google, etc.)
- April 2 - PNW Drupal Summit report out, infrastructure/hosting solutions/workflows
- May 7 - Tough problems
- June 4 or July 2 - DrupalCon report out, new UW Surplus site
And these are other topic ideas:
- User training
- Drupal 7 to 8 migrations
- D8 multisite gotchas
- Google Tag Manager
- Content strategies (panels, blocks, views, nodes)
- Faculty profile updates
- Getting users to update (yellowing page module)
- Content audit review
- Brand update/new theme
- User audit
- Drupal security strategies
- Accessibility
- Module update strategy - how to log and track
- Intranets
Reminder that the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit is coming up March 28-29. It's here at Mary Gates Hall. Registration is open.
March 5, 2020
Site Search Modules
A few members shared what they are using for search on their sites.
Heather Wozniak from the College of Arts & Sciences shared that they are using Google Custom Search Engine on multiple sites. Search needs for these sites are simple and Google does a good job of returning relevant results. They use the UW's custom search engine and limit the results to the specific subdomain of each site. For Drupal 7 they use Google Custom Search and for Drupal 8 they use Flexible Google Custom Search (a newer module that is less buggy and more streamlined). Email asweb@uw.edu if you want to know more details about their configuration.
Paul Keyes from College of Education shared about their Search API setup. They use Search API Database Search module in combination with Views and the in order to combine node and non-node entities into custom search indexes. Paul also discussed struggles with Google Custom Search and Apache Solr. They are assessing external vendors to enhance the search experience on their sites.
Jeanna Vogt from Facilities Services shared about their Apache Solr setup.
There was a short discussion and follow up questions.
Zoom Meetings
The group decided that we will broadcast our next meeting over Zoom. Now that Zoom Pro is available to all faculty, staff, and students, this will be a little easier because we don't need to use a specific paid account. We will encourage participants to share their cameras and audio to make it a little more interactive. We will also do our best to use laptops at each table to pick up the audio in the room. In the event that campus closes or most people are working remotely, we can hold the whole meeting virtually, but for now we'll plan to use Zoom as an option to complement the in-person meeting. Wil Samson will be point-person for setting up the Zoom meeting (thanks, Wil!).
UW Giving Module
Andrew Wilson from the College of Arts & Sciences shared about a new module he developed for Drupal 8. It adds a block type that you can use to embed UW Advancement Online Giving forms on your site. Each block can be configured to show a specific fund or set of funds, have an appeal code, send donors to a certain tab, and more. He will send an email to the Drupal list with more info. It's also listed on our Community Themes and Modules page.
April 2, 2020
We had a fully virtual meeting due to restricted campus operations. Andrew Wilson led us through a discussion about infrastructure, hosting, and workflows. Topics we touched on included integrations with UW web services and external web services, hosting platforms, automated testing, deployment workflows, and local development tools. We decided to do a deeper dive into a few of the topics next month, with some actual demos.
May 7, 2020
Virtual meeting. Andrew Wilson demoed how to use Lando to set up local work environments, including using the drupal7 or drupal8 recipes and adding custom tooling. If any UW developers would like to look at the College of Arts & Sciences repos to see examples of Lando configuration, email asweb@uw.edu to request access to their Bitbucket repos.
June 4, 2020
Virtual meeting. Thomas Kiehne demoed how to use ddev to set up local work environments and Andrew Wilson demoed how to work with the Platform.sh hosting environment.
December 3, 2020
At today's meeting we were joined by Al Brower, Claudia Aguirre and Johnathan Shilling of the College of Engineering and they talked about the Immersive Story Module For Drupal 8 which they developed based on the Immersive Story WordPress plugin created for the UW by UW Marketing's Teri Shelton.
Presentation: coe-immersive-stories.pptx
Code on UW CoE Github: https://github.com/uw-coeweb/immersive-stories
UMAC’s Wordpress Plugin: https://github.com/uweb/uw-storytelling-modules