Design and User Experience

Many universities are adopting Backdrop CMS for various reasons, with budget efficiency and flexibility being key factors. As financial and structural considerations become increasingly important, let's explore the features that can make the CampusDrop platform a strong choice for educational institutions (K-12, community colleges, and universities). We'll discuss flexible layouts with Layout Paragraphs, customizable content types, preset views, and display options, among other capabilities designed to meet the unique needs of educational organizations.

I returned from Drupalcon Atlanta a few days ago, and there were MANY things I learned about there that may impact various aspects of Backdrop.  Let's talk about them.

We recently had our first regular Documentation meeting and one of the main areas of focus was looking at how people find the information they are looking for on our documentation site.  We started to talk about how we could improve the home page and create "pathways" for people to easily find what they need based on what they are doing.

What would help you find the documentation you need?

What gaps are there in the documentation and who can write the content to fill the gaps? 

Review of some of the demonstrated use cases for Higher Ed:

• Research Apps
• Upgrades from D7
• Custom workflow applications
• Unified theme and configuration system for multiple subdomains

Conversation, questions, and discussions with the group.

The Gin admin theme has been ported (is being ported) to Backdrop from modern Drupal, and I'm curious if people have any thoughts about the future. This is an open conversation for people who love Gin, don't like Gin, or don't even know about Gin.

We are looking for 5 people to give a short demo of a module or theme. Either a module they maintain or just one they like to use. Could be an obscure module that site architechts should know about or a more popular module that you love to use.

We have five slots during this session:

Gin is a popular admin theme for modern Drupal. Sascha Eggenberger (Gin's creator and maintainer for Drupal) and I have been working on a port to bring this fresh UI to Backdrop.

Examples of things this conversation could cover:

WordPress powers over 40% of websites on the internet. It offers a user-friendly interface, a vast library of plugins and themes, and a large community of developers and users who contribute to its ongoing development and support. There are over 455 million active installations of WordPress software, compared to...fewer Backdrop installations. 

The views module is a powerful tool that allows site administrators to create complicated and dynamic displays of their content without writing any code or knowledge of database queries. 

• Create a basic view
• Filter your data with views
• Sort your data with views
• Rewriting your data in views
• What happens if there is no data in your view (no results)
• Contextual Filters
• Relationships
• Views header and footer
• View pagers

The Friends of the Mississippi have been using Drupal for a long time and have accumulated 1000's of pieces of content (nodes). Their website is an important tool in their daily efforts to engage with the community to protect, restore and enhance the Mississippi River and its watershed in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) region.