The big picture of content strategy: Choices and compromises

This session will share the lessons learned from 5 years of teaching Drupal to complete beginners in a university setting, taking a mindful "big picture" approach to learning. Beginner and intermediate site builders and content strategists will learn to place their work within the bigger context of CMS, information architecture, and content strategy.

Lessons to be covered include:

• Knowing how to build a site is important short term; knowing why you made your configuration choices is important long term.
• Drupal excels on projects where content has categories and relationships.
• Fields are the building blocks on which flexibility of Drupal is based.
• Information architecture is a choice - there is no one right way to do it.
• "There is a module for it" is a bad approach because it leads to inefficient configurations and module bloat.
• A site builder must find a balance between reusing and automating every feature and building everything as a standalone feature - it is always a compromise.
• Each task can be accomplished in more than one way, so a builder must learn to try several options, and then once the option is chosen, clean up the configuration and remove the other options.
• Modules that extend core functionality are better than modules that replace and modify core functionality.
• More modules in core in Drupal 8 make the mindful approach easier to implement.