OUTDATED: Drupal for Information Architects: an overview of configurability
Note that this article was written for Drupal 4.6.
Information Architecture (often abbreviated "I.A.") is the practice of structuring information (knowledge or data). These are often structured according to their context in user interactions or larger databases. -Wikipedia.com
Drupal provides several ways to structure information through layout, navigation, styling, and applications. It provides a framework for managing information as content through extensible applications called modules. The modules provide user interactions with content, such as a volunteer management application. Each module provides a configurable administration interface to customize it's application behaviour. Permissions for each module are configurable for each custom user role.
There are over 370 modules currently available for the 4.6 release which allows a high degree of customization without any programming. Complete customization can be done using CSS, PHP, and AJAX. While each web site has it's own complexity a highly functional and customized site with a modified theme, permissions for user roles, and configured modules can be deployed in hours.
Layout Drupal supports the layout of content in three main ways: Blocks, columns, and menu's. Blocks have 5 default regions: left, right, header, footer, and content. These are extensible to more regions. Drupal can be themed to have a variety of column layouts with the most popular layout being the three column layout with a floating center column. Layouts can be implemented using Drupal's theme system with PHP and styled with CSS. Drupal also has configurable menu system which can be configured to provide navigation in a block.
Drupal has a rudimentary wireframe module which allows IA's to create interface components in HTML and then configure those components on a live site for user testing. The wireframe theme style which is selectable in seconds, is part of the CivicSpace theme.
Navigation Drupal supports many different times of navigation including global, local, contextual, and situational navigation. Drupal's theme system allows for configuration of primary and secondary navigation, independent of other navigation, that can be statically defined in theme administration.
Theme based navigation is often used for global navigation either in the header, tabs, or a footer. Local navigation is often implemented dynamically through the use of categories, child links in menu, or dynamic blocks. Contextual navigation such as breadcrumbs to show where in the site users are is implemented typically in the theme template. Situation navigation can be implemented through the use of response messages indicating error or success. Common situation navigation is navigation to help from inside a user form.
Styling Drupal ships with a series of default themes that are configurable for the site or selectable per users. Drupal makes use of PHP in theme templates to help with styling the xHTML about from Drupal and it's modules. Cascading Style Sheets are used to implement changes in color, color grouping, and typography. Themes can be customized to allow for special styling on site location, user status, or content types. Graphics and images can be embedded into themes or content.
Categorization One of the most popular ways IA's structure information is through the use of Drupal's categories and over 20 contributed modules for extending categories. Drupal allows you to manage categories, alternately refered to as taxonomies, using tags, flat, hierarchical, and multi-hierarchical vocabularies. Information can be structured by categorizing content which can add semantic information to content. IA's and site developers frequently implement navigating by categories using Drupal to meet the information flow or the business rules of their organization.
Applications Drupal has approximately 570 contributed applications, refered to as modules, with 360 modules available in the current 4.6 Drupal release. The modules can be categorized into the following groups:
- 3rd party integration
- Administration
- Categories
- Community
- Content
- Commercial advertising
- Evaluations and ratings
- Events
- File management
- Filters/Editors
- GUI/Content Display
- Import/Export
- Location
- Media
- Security
- Syndication
- Themes
- User Access and Authentication
- Utility
- Other
This page was writing by Kieran Lal, from CivicSpace Labs, if you are interested in contributing Information Architecture expertise to the Drupal project or contributed to this page please contact me.