Information Architecture

How do you make the default installation of Drupal into what you want? How do you know which modules you will need? How do you organize your content? How do you get your content into your site?

The USAID Knowledge Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD) Portal is a Drupal-based portal of sites built on a single-installation of Drupal 6.x. My role with the QED Group includes both liaising with QED’s web development vendor during the site development process and helping to build internal Drupal capacity among the KDMD team.

The QED Group contracted with me to help them with the Drupal implementation projects. For this project I was asked to assess a site they had received from their developer and then help them bring the project to launch.

Have you ever wanted to land on a node and have a block appear showing another node(s) that shares the same vocabulary term? This is easy enough if you only have a small predictable number of nodes and terms. You could simply create a series of view blocks that show all nodes with the term you want and then assign the block to the specific node. But, what if you wanted this block process to work when there was an undetermined number of nodes and terms? And what if you didn't want your client to have to create a block (manually or via a view) and assign the block each time a term was added?

Information architecture (IA) is an emerging practice being integrated into multiple disciplines so it is hard to find one definition that multiple disciplines share. Below are three definitions. What is consistent is the idea that IA is art and/or science and IA has to do with organizing information.

Sometimes instruction is more than how-to steps in a video- or print-based tutorial. There are a lot of Drupal tutorials available and the best ones offer more than the steps you should follow in order to accomplish a task in Drupal. They sprinkle in foundational facts, concepts, principles, and/or rules about the procedure to accommodate different learner skill levels and to help make the tutorial more memorable, more understandable. I can't tell you that the developers of these successful tutorials know they are doing this (for all I know they are natural instructors), but if you want some ideas on how to make your tutorials (video or print) a little better, I offer you this resource on instructional design content structures. Each structure can play a role in the learning process.

There are many configuration and access options available in OG, how do you decide what you need? Check out Planning your OG Site on IDCM Innovations Groups site.

As the Webmaster for the Instructional Resource Center at George Mason University, I designed, developed, and delivered two introductory workshops on online databases.

At the time these were created, faculty and staff were starting to see the advantages of putting data online via a database. GMU was not prepared to allow all faculty and staff to create database driven dynamic websites.