DRUPAL as a RAD Framework for Non Profits / NGOs

Anoop JohnFounder & CTOwww.zyxware.com

• Society and space for Social Action

• How Technology can play a role

• What is Drupal?

• Why Drupal is a good fit for not-for-profits?

• Basic Drupal concepts

• Aspects of a web application

• Managing Layout in Drupal

• Managing Content / Data in Drupal

• Presentation of Content

• Roles & Permissions

Contents

• Workflows around Content

• Rules & Business Logic

• Ecommerce & Payments

• Drupal Commons – OOTB Social Site

• Other cool Drupal features

• Example

• Key modules to remember

• About Zyxware

• Questions

Contents (contd...)

• Society as a complex system

• Continuity from end to end, different stages of development

• Different problems requiring different solutions

• Different contexts requiring different solutions

• Market based approach

• Where markets don't work

• Where markets can complement

• Huge opportunity to contribute

• Complex problems to be solved

• Billions of lives to be impacted

Society and Space for Social Action

• Easy to learn system & technology

• Ability to leverage on existing systems

• Not have to re-invent the wheel

• Build systems without a lot of capital investments

• Use proven concepts and models

• Integrate with other solutions

• Ability to customize easily

• Ability to build and maintain

• Allow extending and growth

What a non profit would look for when building web applications?

• A citizen centric system to audit and monitor progress of

public sector projects

• A system to collect public opinion through surveys

• A citizen centric system to report civic problems – eg:

unauthorized garbage dumps

• Notification system for letting citizens know about issues –

eg: Power/Water outage in a specific area

• Automation and improvement of efficiencies in existing public

systems

• Improving governance and government ↔ citizen

communication

• Monitoring rain water, monitoring power theft

A few examples

• My Experiments with Truth - M. K. Gandhi

• Development as Freedom - Amartya Sen

• Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid - C. K. Prahalad

• The world is flat - Thomas L. Friedman

Books for thought

• Drupal is a Content Management System

• Built on PHP, MySQL, HTML, JS, CSS

• Allows collection, presentation

& management of structured information

• Allows building websites

• Allows building dynamic web applications

• API to build and extend the application

• Extensible, Modular, Pluggable, Scalable

• Thousands of modules to extend the capabilities without

writing a line of code

• Drupal is more than a Content Management System. It is a

Rapid Application Development Framework

What is Drupal?

• Fully functional website out of the box

• Fully functional CMS out of the box

• More than 10000 modules to extend

• Ability to build applications with workflows, permissions, rules

without writing a line of code

• Out of the box CRUD system for complex data collection,

presentation and management

• Control over layout without coding

• Drupal distributions OOTB systems

• Strong API for future extension

• Stable and secure platform

• Good community support

Why Drupal is a good fit for non profits

• Entity & Node

• Content Types

• Modules – core & contrib

• Themes

• Blocks & Menus

• Roles and Permissions

• Administration

• Hooks & Callbacks

• Form API

Basic Drupal concepts

• Structure of layout

• Collection of structured information

• Presentation of information

• Roles and Permissions

• Workflow related to collected information

• Business Logic

Aspects of a web application

• Structure of layout

• Themes

• Regions

• Block System

• Custom HTML

• Automatically generated content

• Panels

• Panes

• Landing pages

• Contexts

Managing Layout in Drupal

• Entity

• Node

• Content Types

• Fields

• Edit forms

• Taxonomy

• Taxonomy listing

• Webforms – custom surveys

Managing Content / Data in Drupal

• Data abstraction with Views

• Views displays

• Pages, Blocks, Feeds, Panes

• Views theming

• Export – CSV, XML

Presentation of Content

• Access Control at interface level

• Access Control at code level

• Users

• Roles

• Permissions

Roles and Permissions

• Views & dashboards

• Roles & Permissions in views

• Nodequeues

• Flags

• Views bulk operations

• Workflow module

• Edit / View permissions

Workflows around Content

• Events & Triggers

• Context & Data

• Actions

• Send emails

• Redirect users

• Update content, set values

• Creating custom actions

• Exposing custom events

Rules and Business Logic

• Drupal Commerce

• Ubercart

• Paypal

• CCAvenue

• Banking gateway integration

Ecommerce & Payments

• Contact management

• Contributions

• Communications

• Peer-To-Peer Fundraisers

• Advocacy Campaigns

• Events

• Members

• Reports

• Case Management

Drupal + CiviCRM integration – specially made for non-profits

• Supported by Acquia

• Social networking system

out of the box

• Integration with other social

networking systems

• Ability to extend using

modules / custom code

Drupal Commons – OOTB Social Site

• Multisite & Individual Domains

• Aegir for deployments & PaaS

• Third party integration

• Import and Export of Data

• Services, XMLRPC, REST, JSON

• Backend for mobile application

• Mobile theming + regular theming

Other cool Drupal features

• Roles – Admin, Speaker, Attendee

• Suggest Event – Event Content Type, Fields, Status

• Event – Status as not approved

• Event Schedule - View

• Approval Queue

• Blog

• Nodequeue – Home page

• My Events - Flag

Example

Rules Panels

ViewsNodequeue

Flag

FeedsContext

FieldsFivestar

Services

VBO

Webform

Taxonomy

Node

Admin Menu

Zyxware Technologies and Drupal

Zyxware is a leading contributor to Drupal from India and is one of only

eight Featured Service Providers from India listed on drupal.org

● Over 40,000 websites use our modules and themes

● More than 30 contributed modules and themes

● Maintainer of Search404, a top 100 Drupal module

● Over 1000 commits at drupal.org

● Contributes all patches back to Drupal

● Our profile on drupal.org - http://drupal.org/user/222163

● Knowledge partnerships with Acquia, New Relic and Volacci

● Freedom Walk, a 44 day walk by a team of

Free Software Evangelists across the length of

Kerala to promote Free Software

● Building RithuOS, an Operating System for Engineering

students with Free Software Engineering applications

● GNU/Linux Install Fests in Schools, Colleges and at Technopark.

● Local language (Malayalam) computing camps in colleges

● Building and Maintenance of Freedom Toaster, a Free Software

kiosk

● Conducting Free Software workshops and

lectures in colleges in Kerala

Free Software and Zyxware Technologies

• Check us out at http://www.zyxware.com

• Mail us at drupal@zyxware.com

• Like us at http://www.facebook.com/zyxware

• Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/zyxware

• Connect with us at

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/zyxware-technologies

• Talk to us at +91-9495969446 between 9AM - 9PM IST

• Skype me at aj_zyxware

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