Creating a support site - The Weekly Drupal, 11 September 2009

We're making some nice progress on the creation of a template site to which we can replicate in order to migrate our 70 affiliate sites into a single codebase, mult-site installation of Drupal (as per this page). We have a group of so-called "early testers" who will have their sites migrated first and will then perform some of the basic operations for managing their site: creating content, managing their menu, blocks, etc.

So, it's now time to start a support site. I chose a very simply theme (actually the same theme as this blog) - the Clean theme. Authentication will be based our external user database, as will be the case with all of our sites. We've decided to start the documentation and instructions on the site in a very minimal way and we've enabled both commenting and forums in the hopes that the users (early testers) themselves will give us hints as to what doesn't make sense and what bugs they have encountered.

Also, Drupal's built-in forums are a great way to have users discuss issues and perhaps help each other learn the system. Eventually, our hope is that our support site will become a support community site and our users (the webmasters of each of the 70 sites) will share tips and offer direct feedback to us in an open and transparent manner via comments and forums. The site will be password-protected and we're using Drupal's standard permissions and roles to manage who sees what.

Our next big challenges are:

• integrating our Drupal sites with our Google Mini search appliance (we want to continue use the Google search appliance we have as it is pre-configured to search our many collections of data, many of which will NOT be migrated into Drupal)
• recreating our podcasting apparatus (I have some good info on this already. See this module and this video)
• re-theming our flagship site and re-doing the information architecture (not really Drupal challenges, per se)

The Weekly Drupal is a weekly column on mavergames.net about Drupal from the perspective of a new user. Use this feed to subscribe.

Please note: there will be no Weekly Drupal for the next few weeks as I'm away. So, look for another post in early October.