Drupal Kit Documentation
The UT Drupal Kit (UTDK) is a custom distribution of the open-source Drupal content management system, designed for websites with public-facing content. Depending on the needs of the customer and project, the Drupal Kit is available as different offerings. You can find examples of the Drupal content blocks here.
Training
The University Marketing and Communications Web Team offers by-appointment training on Drupal CMS, the Monsido Quality Assurance Tool, and understanding your Google Datastudio Report, among others. Please email fascommweb@austin.utexas.edu to request training.
Web Best Practices
In this class, we’ll cover the basics of the four pillars of good websites: usability, readability, searchability, and accessibility.
- Usability—Is your site easy to use? How can you be sure? We’ll explore what your users want and how to test it. Say it with me, “I am not my user”.
- Readability—Discover how to make your pages scannable and easy to read, putting vital information first.
- Searchability—Knowing and using your (and your users!) keywords, leveraging QA tools, content formatting, and linking to make search engines (and your users!) love your website.
- Accessibility—Optimize your web pages for a wide range of abilities and devices through a simple web content management system interface, like Drupal or Wordpress.
These skills are also the basics of performing a web content audit. We’ll cover how to perform a rapid web content audit and what University Marketing and Communications web team can provide to get you started. You will leave this class with practical, everyday tips for improving your website for all types of users.
Writing for the Web
Did you know users don’t initially read your web page, but scan the page instead?
Did you know it’s recommended to have a much lower word count than in print writing?
Did you know you should be aiming for an 8th-grade reading level for general content pages?
If any of this comes as a surprise, then the Writing for the Web course is for you.
In this class we'll cover:
- The ways users scan your website.
- How to make your site more scannable.
- The inverted pyramid style of writing.
- What users do and do not like in web writing.
- Writing for your audience.
- When and where to use a call to action.
- How a well-written website reduces your workload.
You will leave with practical, everyday tips for editing your website (and email!) to improve the user experience, decrease your workload, and increase your website’s search engine results.
Pantheon Web Hosting
The Undergraduate College website is hosted on Pantheon. Pantheon Web Hosting is a commercial platform-as-a-service (PaaS) website host built on cloud infrastructure selected by ITS to provide dedicated hosting for Drupal and WordPress websites. Six FAS Communications-managed websites currently reside on Pantheon. Pantheon provides a suite of tools for website development, deployment, and management:
- Development, test, and live environments for each site, with a web-based user interface for syncing content and files between environments
- Automated deployment tools for managing releases
- Built-in version control using Git
- Automated and on-demand backups via site dashboard
- New Performance Monitoring tool integrated into site dashboard
- Multidev feature for creating ad-hoc environments to stage new features in development
- Site Team Management tools
- UT’s multi-factor (EID Password/DUO) authentication
Pantheon's global content delivery network (CDN) provides improved performance and security for customer sites. It has strategically distributed points of presence around the globe, where site pages and assets are cached, and HTTPS certificates are fully managed using Let's Encrypt. Global CDN is SOC 2 compliant and offers protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that target network or application layers. Pantheon’s Global CDN provides industry-leading web application firewalls (WAF)-style rules and DDoS protection filtering for the management of denial of service attacks. By filtering ongoing attacks and isolating traffic streams for each site and environment, Pantheon provides dedicated resources in times of need and prevents impact between customer websites. (See more on Pantheon security.)