Drupal – and heeeeere we go!

Have been away most of June but am back now and ready to properly take on Drupal…

We installed Acquia Drupal over a month ago now and will soon move from “playing” to the real, nitty-gritty work of configuring a master Drupal installation to run our 70-odd sites. Basically, we have installed Drupal in the cloud and will use this one Drupal install to run our main site plus our 70 affiliate sites. The question(s) that face us now are many and filled with minutiae that relate to how we currently manage our sites in the Dreamweaver world. One of the biggest challenges I see so far is to think differently about how we work. There is no de facto reason why we have to replicate exactly the work patterns, workflows and systems we currently use. Perhaps Drupal has a better way!

I’m finding the following difficult:

• organizing my team – until now, I’ve just given rough parameters for each programmer and turned them loose to play; now, however, it’s time to reign everyone in and get some focus. Tricky stuff…
• recognizing dependencies between possible ways of doing things: if we choose x or y method in Drupal to manage a or z how will the first decision affect the latter, and how to know!
• prioritization: themes then content? or get the systems for content in place then worry about how they look? etc.

We have about 3-4 months for the “programming & implementation” phase before we are scheduled to enter the “deployment and testing” which includes data migration. Are we insane or can this be done in that amount of time?!