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Coming Soon: UT Drupal Kit 2.3

We are on the cusp of releasing our latest iteration of UT Drupal Kit: version 2.3. As with its predecessors, this release includes Drupal updates and also comes with a number of new features.

Highlights

  • Security updates: Drupal 7.50 & contributed modules. Developers with existing Drupal Kit sites should follow UT Drupal Kit update steps as soon as possible.
  • An events content type is available as a standalone download.
  • Announcements can be displayed on the homepage or sitewide, with a variety of display options.
  • Drupal Kit sites can now be installed on or migrated to Pantheon‘s hosting service.
  • Twitter widget improvements: accessibility & retweet profile images.
  • Blocks from any contributed module can be configured to be available in the drag-and-drop Page Builder tool.
  • <object> and <param> tags (in addition to <script> and <iframe>) are now allowed to trusted content editors via the Blocks interface.
  • Pathologic and View Unpublished modules added.
  • A “Last Updated” timestamp can be displayed on a per-page basis.
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Uncategorized UT Drupal Kit UT QuickSites

Yes, Drupal Kit does responsive tables

One big advantage of building a website with UT Drupal Kit is that, out of the box, your site is fully responsive. Regardless whether it’s viewed on a desktop, tablet, or smart phone, content fits intelligently to the screen width.

To qualify as fully responsive, that means that tables also need to fit. This is no straightforward task. How, for example, should the following table fit into a portrait-oriented phone display and still be readable?

HTML table with four columns

There are a number of approaches that tackle this challenge. The design firm behind the homepage redesign, Springbox, selected the Filament Group‘s “Tablesaw” approach, and when we set out to build a Drupal distribution for the UT community, we concurred with that decision.

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Page Builder UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit 2.2 Release

ITS is happy to announce the immediate availability of UT Drupal Kit 2.2, the second maintenance release for our University distribution since the inclusion of the Forty Acres theme and the Page Builder module. Additionally, we have also released the first two sets of “Add-On” features that can be downloaded separately and added to a Drupal Kit-based site.

There are some major changes to the Forty Acres and STARTERKIT themes in this release that will necessitate some work for developers who have created a STARTERKIT-based subtheme in any previous version of the Drupal Kit. And leveraging some of the other new features in version 2.2 will require manual configuration changes for existing sites.

We have extensive guidance available for users updating from previous versions, but first let’s walk through some of the notable features of the distribution update…

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UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit Update – February 2016

We gave a presentation to the UT Drupal Users Group on Tuesday, February 16 to give the campus community a status update on the UT Drupal Kit since the 2.0 release last November.

The presentation was captured on video and is available for review on YouTube. Slides are available for download from the UT Drupal Users Group wiki.

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UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit 2.1 Release

ITS is happy to announce the immediate availability of UT Drupal Kit 2.1, the first maintenance release for our University distribution since the inclusion of the Forty Acres theme and the Page Builder module.

The most visible changes in this release are primarily CSS fixes/updates in the Forty Acres theme, but there are a few other goodies that we’ve thrown in based on feedback from early adopters. Additionally, since this is the first time that most site owners will be updating their UT Drupal Kit installations, we want to remind you about the documentation for updating, as well as tell you about a new update path that we’re rolling out for UT Web users.

First let’s walk through the most notable changes…

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UT Drupal Kit

How the Drupal Kit does analytics

You’ve built your shiny new Drupal Kit website. You’ve launched it, to roaring intradepartmental applause. But now your boss wants metrics on who’s accessing what. You’ll need some kind of analytics tool.

Since this desire for site statistics is so ubiquitous, we decided to bake it into the UT Drupal Kit. For some time now, the most widely adopted solution — both on campus and in general — has been Google Analytics, and we saw no reason to diverge from this. The Drupal Kit is thus set up to send tracking data to a user-created Google Analytics account. It also integrates with Google’s next-gen analytics tool, Tag Manager, which significantly widens the ambit of site metrics.

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Page Builder UT Drupal Kit

UT Drupal Kit FYI Presentation

On December 9, 2015, staff from ITS Applications and the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost gave an FYI presentation about UT Drupal Kit 2.0.

The presentation includes an overview and background of the Drupal Kit project, brief demonstrations of the capabilities of the Fort Acres theme and Page Builder module, and walkthroughs of two live sites that have already been built using the Drupal Kit.

A recording of this presentation is available to stream, and the slides are available to download.

 

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Getting to know Page Builder (part 2 of 2)

Part 1 of “Getting to know Page Builder” discussed the conceptual approach that Page Builder takes to arranging content. In Part 2, below, I discuss how we built this in Drupal. This post is primarily useful for developers using the Drupal Kit who may want to do things like create their own Page Builder templates.

Page Builder is a custom Drupal module for assembling page content using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. To first get an idea of the end-product in action, watch this video demo.

The following explains how it all works within Drupal.

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Page Builder UT Drupal Kit UT QuickSites

Getting to know Page Builder (part 1 of 2)

Last week, ITS released our 2.0 version of the UT Drupal Kit. It adds quite a lot to the University web developer toolkit, supplementing the centralized CMS ecosystem that has so far consisted of the University Blog Service and the (now legacy mode) UT CMS.

What, exactly, does it add? In addition to the UT-branded theme we’re calling “Forty Acres,” it has a custom, drag-and-drop interface for assembling pages, whose functionality was developed by Springbox. We’ve dubbed our broader re-tooling of this “Page Builder.”

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UT Drupal Kit UTLogin

UT Drupal Kit 2.0 is here!

ITS is proud to announce the release of version 2.0 of the UT Drupal Kit. The Drupal Kit is UT Austin’s custom Drupal distribution, which “aims to simplify development of websites on campus, standardize University brand templates, and improve accessibility compliance while allowing developers to retain control over customization.”

This exciting new release contains the first iteration of a Drupal theme, called “Forty Acres,” which implements the new UT Austin branding. The Drupal Kit also now includes a custom module called “Page Builder,” which provides page templates, flexible content widgets, and a drag-and-drop layout editor, all of which together will allow site owners to create pages that match the designs created by University Communications and Springbox as part of the Digital Experience project.

Extensive documentation aimed at both developers and site builders, including eight video tutorials, is available on the new UT Drupal Kit documentation wiki.

This release and the accompanying documentation, along with the UTLogin module for Drupal released earlier this year, represent the full realization of the original goals of the Drupal Foundation Project:

[A]n updated, tested and deployable version of Drupal; related Drupal modules; a university-branded theme; and the documentation necessary to use, support and maintain the distribution package.

We are very excited to share this work with the community, and look forward to seeing what people do with it! Stay tuned to this blog for more information about the Drupal Kit and other upcoming Drupal services from ITS.

There will be an FYI presentation about UT Drupal Kit 2.0 on December 9 at 10:30am in POB 2.402. More information is available on the FYI website.