This months’ Web Publishing Community saw a comprehensive update on the Drupal project, a live demo of the Balsamiq prototyping tool, and a presentation from Arthur Wilson on different ways to embed PURE data in Drupal.

Drupal update

Neil’s presentation took up the entire first half of this month’s session. He gave a great overview of all the complexities and interpendencies of ongoing development and migration, and how we’ve chosen the initial early adopters, which will be announced in April.

Neil also gave a preview of work around the front-end design. The Website Programme and Communications and marketing are working with Headscape on this project, aiming to deliver a design that’s flexible and responsive and doesn’t jar too much with what we have already, which is an important factor given full migration will take some time.

Why use protyping?

Duncan MacGruer, who’s taking over my role in the next few months while I’m off on maternity leave, also gave a great presentation on how we can all be using prototypes at various stages of web development work. He ran over several benefits to prototyping, including:

• gathering user (or business) requirements
• thinking through scenarios & possibilities
• try out different potential solutions
• communicating effectively
• reducing risk of rework

Discussion in the pub afterwards focussed on how to get buy-in from stakeholders who might want to ‘rush to the development’ as to the value of the prototyping, and convincing people it really does save time (and therefore money) in the long run.

Let us know by commenting below if you have any experience of this or tips you’d like to share.

• Read Duncan’s post with more information on his session and details of how to use Balsamiq

Integrating PURE

The last presentation was from Arthur Wilson and talked about how people or publication information can be pulled out from PURE and published on current Drupal websites. Stratos, one of our Programme Managers, has been talking to Arthur about how this fits with the current University widget and user-friendly opportunities for the future.

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future PURE development, you can comment on the discussion wiki.

• PURE widget feedback [EASE login required]