The goal of the new Drupal Case Studies community initative is to highlight outstanding implementations of Drupal.

Looking for feedback and suggestions on these proposed guidelines.

PROPOSED GUIDELINES:

What to migrate

Existing case study or showcase items must meet the following guidelines to be migrated to the new case study content type.

Case Study Quality Guidelines

  • Site must still be in Drupal
  • Case study content must contain sufficient technical detail.
  • Site must but still be actively updated
  • Site has produced outstanding contributions to the Drupal community (e.g. new modules) or pushes the boundaries of design and interaction on a Drupal site

Step 1: Evaluate

Be critical! Only the best, most impressive sites should be migrated to case studies.

  1. Start at the deepest level and after the sprint, assign a group of sites to yourself by adding a comment to the appropriate migration issue.
  2. Look at the content. Does it meet the Quality Guidelines from above?
  3. Look at a site URL from the node and the source code. Is it a Drupal site? Does it look good? Is the content current? Is it still a positive example for the Drupal community?

If 1-3 above were all yes, go to step 2: migrate.
If no, go to the Cleanup section below.

Step 2: Migrate

  1. If 1-3 above were all yes, create a new case study.
  2. If the design has changed or there aren't any images, grab new screenshots, (see http://drupal.org/node/762 for guidance)
  3. Feel free to revise the contents to improve grammar, flow etc. follow the guidelines for content (http://drupal.org/style-guide/content)
  4. If you can't fill in a field leave it blank or if it's required, put n/a in it. We can evaluate those later.
  5. On save, the node will be published.
  6. Leave a comment in the appropriate issue with urls of old case study and new one which you created, so that migrated nodes could be unpublished
    For migrated book pages - issue #372039: List out and migrate case studies from book pages to new Case study content type
    For migrated forum posts - issue #1429412: List out and migrate best case studies from 'Drupal showcase forum' to new Case study content type

Cleanup

If no, case study does not meets the Quality Guidelines:

  1. Add a comment to #1487728: Sites from 'Sites Made with Drupal' that won't be migrated to the new /case-studies page, listing node to be unpublished. Try to list several sites in a comment, to keep the list from getting too long! I will roll comments into the issue summary as needed.. OR
  2. Add a comment to #1487728: Sites from 'Sites Made with Drupal' that won't be migrated to the new /case-studies page, as author was contacted. While we don't want to make extra work for ourselves, if the site is awesome and the case study content is pretty good, but just missing a bit of detail, it might be a good idea to contact the author with the option to improve and migrate the content themselves. Note in comments if you did that. This ensures we've given authors adequate time to update their case study and migrate it to the new content type. Suggested template:
  3. A site admin will unpublish the node and redirect it to drupal.org/case-studies
Hello, your site showcase content at [link] has been identified for removal from drupal.org, during our cleanup the old case study content. If you would like to keep this, intending to need the quality guidelines [link] and be migrated to the new content type [link].

If you are not interested in updating this content, let us know. If we don't hear from you, the node will eventually be deleted.

Admin tasks

  • Unpublish the ones identified as low quality ones
  • Do a 301 redirect from old case study to new node, and assign the author name as the original submitter's (admin-only task)
  • LASTLY: Do a 301 redirect http://drupal.org/cases to the new page http://drupal.org/case-studies

Comments

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

updated instructions

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

update instructions

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

update instructions

gdemet’s picture

Case studies should identify what version of Drupal is being used, and if it's an older version no longer supported by the community (e.g., 5.x or earlier), it should be considered for a special archive section or deleted. We should only be publicly promoting really old sites if they were truly something special.

Is content from the Showcase forum that was promoted to the home page (which constitutes many of the best-written case studies) being evaluated, or only content from http://drupal.org/cases (most of which is horribly outdated)?

lisarex’s picture

Ideally, those sites will be upgraded to newer version of Drupal, so it won't be a concern, but we'll need to do periodic reviews. There's already a lot of fields.

The plan is to tackle both the forum and /cases.

The forum needs to exist for people to just post basic site announcements, and keep the Drupal Case Studies page tidy.

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

bit about unpublish / redirect

larowlan’s picture

Tried this workflow with http://drupal.org/symantec-connect-social-business-software it is hard to map the existing content to the field. (new node: http://drupal.org/node/1495516).
Perhaps it is best to place the emphasis on the original author?
Eg I can decipher key modules from the post but as to why they were chosen? No idea.
I've added it to the list, as it needs work for a number of fields and I can't access the original images (the existing screenshots are too small).

Also some of the field types have the BUEditor but don't allow html. (see http://drupal.org/node/1495516)

But in terms of process - plus 1 from me.
larowlan

larowlan’s picture

See http://drupal.org/node/1495522 for issue to unpublish my test node.

Also, these nodes should go into moderation (unless I've got some elevated privilege) - my test node was published and displayed immediately.

Lee

larowlan’s picture

Test node has been unpublished (in case you can't see it!)

larowlan’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

add admin tasks section

lisarex’s picture

No moderation required. At least for now, while nobody knows that page exists, and during the sprint. We really want to reduce barriers to contributing case studies.

larowan, can you contact the original author?

As for screenshots, can you just take a new one for the main image? I'll look into the Editor thing.

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

fix url to content type

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

update instruction

lisarex’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

more guidelines

Anonymous’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Changed If 1-3 above were all yes, go to step 3: migrate. To read: If 1-3 above were all yes, go to step 2: migrate.

Anonymous’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

repaired link to create new case study

lisarex’s picture

Title: Old case studies/Sites made with Drupal PROPOSED migration guidelines » Migration guidelines for evaluating and updating old case studies
Status: Active » Needs review
Issue tags: +drupal.org case studies

Any problems with the case studies we've migrated so far to drupal.org/case-studies?

larowlan, the HTML filters are in place now on those fields.

davidhernandez’s picture

If I read right, existing case studies are being migrated to a new content type? What is being done about the old node after migration? I don't think I see that in the steps. Is there a step to un-publishing them after migration? (ones that successfully migrated, not the ones rejected.)

davidhernandez’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

updated admin task section

tvn’s picture

Yes, old nodes should be unpublished and redirect set to the new ones. I've added this step to the issue summary.

gdemet’s picture

Status: Needs review » Needs work

As per http://drupal.org/node/1588892 old case studies should not be unpublished if they still have value to the Drupal community, even if they are outdated.

tvn’s picture

We won't unpublish old case studies from Showcase forum since it is not going anywhere. But old section http://drupal.org/cases going to be removed completely. Case studies that were there are currently at Archive book and I'll be contacting their authors, hopefully they will migrate case studies to the new section.

gdemet’s picture

We can move them to a different section that's less publicly accessible, but my point is that we should keep some of those case studies active as they still have historical value to the Drupal project and community.

ryan.gibson’s picture

Hey all,

I'm migrating over our case study at the moment. Everything is going well except that the "Why we chose these modules" section's formatting doesn't seem to be setup. I'm trying to make a bullet list and it isn't working. Thanks for taking the time to look into it!

tvn’s picture

ryanissamson, that field set to Plain text now indeed. I've added this to the list of changes we will do to the case studies feature soon #1612426: Update case studies feature. Someone might change this on live site in the mean time.

Ben Finklea’s picture

On June 2, 2012 at Drupal Camp Vancouver, I managed to gather a handful of people to do a "Migrate D.o Case Studies" sprint. It was impromptu after several discussions with people on how they could help with the Marketing of Drupal. And, we got permission from the camp organizers to make an announcement after the keynote inviting people to come help with this project. Before we even got that far, Kevin Wall and I sat down to start migrating a few case studies. We ran into numerous problems that prevents anyone in the community from helping with this project.

At the bottom of this comment are the specific issues that we ran into. However, the entire list of issues can be summarized as follows:
The task of migrating a case study is too complex. Expertise in at least 5 different fields is required in order to migrate even one case study. That means that there are very few people in the community that can help.

It does not need to be this way! Make each "thing" that needs to be done discreet and executable by those who can do that simple task.

Here is a proposal on how we could break up "case study migration" into the 8 or 9 discrete, defined, process-oriented tasks that would make it easy for anyone to contribute. This would greatly increase the number of people who would then be qualified to work on this project and would accelerate the completion.

A Different Process:

1a. Do a data migration using export import tools instead of asking for manual copy/pasting. Map any fields that can cleanly move from the old content types into the new content type. Especially name of the case study and date created, date modified etc. Any content fields that cannot be cleanly mapped are merged into one big field and put in the body of the new content type.
1b.Create redirects from the old URL to the new URL for each case study.
2. Flag any case studies that have been imported with a distinct tag for each objective criteria that needs to be evaluated:
-Built with Drupal check required
-Site functioning check required
-Screenshot check required
-Field cleanup required
-Sector assignment required
-Grammar check required
-etc.
-Final Check and Approval required

3. Make sure that any case study that is flagged with "Final Check and Approval Required" does not show up in the standard public view. They would still be accessible if someone wanted to see "messy" case studies but generally they would not be viewable.
4. Create a written process for clearing each flag type. Carefully define what each flag means and what should be done by the volunteer to fix that flag. Make sure that there is no subjective evaluation required. For example, "actively updated", "sufficient technical detail", "outstanding contributions", etc. are subjective. What I think is sufficient technical detail is going to be different than someone who is more technical than I am.
(As it stands right now the only non-subjective criteria is whether or not the site is built in Drupal. Clearly, the intention was to set a higher bar, it's just not immediately clear how high that bar is.)
5. Create a view for each flag. So, for example, if I am a non-technical newbie to Drupal but I know how to capture a screenshot, I could pull a list of case studies that have the "Screenshot check required" flag. Then, I can work through the list following the process of checking screenshots and uploading new ones as needed. Then, as I clear the flags, the list of case studies that need screenshots gets shorter. I feel good that I'm helping and it frees up you guys with much higher skill levels to focus on more difficult tasks.
6. There should be a few trusted case study experts (lisarex, gdemet, tvn, etc.) who would have the final review privilege. After all the other flags are cleared, those admins can take a look and give final approval of the now clean and well-written case study. Once the final check flag is removed, the case study is now "live" and shows up in the full case study list.

Done! The benefit as explained above is that you get a lot more people able to help, the high-end contributors are freed up to do the more difficult things, and the project gets done faster.

Here is the list of issues we ran into. If the above process does not meet with approval, these are the things that need to be fixed before migrations can readily be done:

1. The requirement that each old case study be evaluated for quality before it is migrated is onerous. Migrating content and evaluating that content are two very different processes that require different skill sets. By requiring both at the same time, you limit the number of people who can help.
2. It is not easy to see which case studies have already been migrated or worked on.
3. Finding out if a site is on Drupal or not something that everyone knows how to do. It needs to be explained in more detail.
4. Several of the required fields (like why they chose drupal and the modules used) can't be answered from many of the original case studies.
5. It is difficult to understand which "Sector" is the right one for each site.
6. The requirement for a certain image size on the screenshots means that new screenshots must be taken. This would be classified as content creation, not migration and should be a separate task.
7. Most of the Case Study Quality Guidelines are subjective. What does "sufficient technical detail" or "actively updated" or "outstanding contribution" really mean?
8. There are half a dozen different pages that need to be read to understand how to migrate a single case study. This means that someone should spend an hour or two reading before they can even think about doing a migration. And, it's easy to make a mistake.
9. There isn't a way to unpublish and redirect old case studies to their new home. This adds another layer of tasks that needs to be done.

tvn’s picture

Ben,
thank you for help with case studies initiative! Just wanted to note that I saw your comment and proposal and will post longer reply tomorrow.

Just a few quick comments, re: evaluation before migration - gdemet already did a huge work of reviewing case studies and posted a list of case studies to be migrated, as well as outdated/classic lists.

For this issue #1429412: List out and migrate best case studies from 'Drupal showcase forum' to new Case study content type the only 3 case studies that are currently being migrated are the ones indicated in comments by gdemet #9 and annie stone #11. The ones that already got migrated have crossed out titles (2 case studies atm).

I also hope that lisarex can share her experience as she organized a sprint at DrupalCon, during which her team migrated 14 case studies and did a review/evaluation of a lot more.

tvn’s picture

So to address first the issues you've ran into.
1. Huge part of case studies have been evaluated by participants of DrupalCon sprint and the rest by me and gdemet, so we now have a list of case studies to be migrated.
2. When someone "claims" a case study for migration, we ask to mention this in comments. Granted not all authors I contacted might do so, I think if we won't hear from them in two weeks time it's safe to assume they are not interested and we should migrate case study ourselves.
3. This is not needed anymore as there is a list of already checked sites.
4. This is true. It's part of the reason why I decided to contact original authors of case studies. Unfortunately if the case study is migrated by volunteers - all we can do is put "N/A" in that field (well particularly for Why Drupal chosen we could write something along the lines that Drupal is awesome :) ).
5. Mistakes can happen if you aren't the author of the case study, but it is not something crucial. Just pick what looks like most fitting.
6. We might think about this. Generally I think it is more efficient when 1 person takes 1 case study and fully works on it.
7. This is mostly true for evaluation and promotion guidelines. Guidelines for case study creation are pretty straightforward (http://drupal.org/node/1588136). We are still working on them though at #1564766: Create case study guidelines, feel free to suggest improvements.
8. While I think it is a little less pages to read, you have a point here. We should update the guide and provide more clear instructions.
9. There is a way to unpublish and redirect but only users with specific roles on d.o can do so. This is a matter of security and we can't grant everyone such a role. But actually this particular task is minor compared to migration of case study itself. I am happy to unpublish and set redirects for migrated case studies.

To summarize I think that it is possible to migrate case studies right now and people do it, but we really can improve the process. And we should start with consolidating all information about migration in one issue with clear guidelines on how to migrate.

I would like to hear more feedback on your proposed process, but generally I feel that we could do this all in more simple way. There are no fields to map apart from title and date so I don't think automated migration will be really efficient here. Case studies largely need to be adapted for the new content type. Do we really need to create new vocabulary and views for various checks for case studies? What if we do a simple spreadsheet with the list of case studies to migrate, columns-checks and +/- indicating what is done for a specific case study. We now have separation between Featured and Community showcase and it is not crucial if Community showcase will contain some not fully complete case studies while we work on them.

I will contact the rest of the case studies' authors in the next few days and we'll give them couple of weeks to reply/migrate. After that we can assemble a spreadsheet and continue with migration in a more structured way.

Meanwhile we can concentrate on another important task - populating Featured case studies section by reviewing community case studies and/or writing new ones.

westend atelier’s picture

I'm new to Drupal and joined Case Studies after attending Drupal Camp Vancouver.

I've done some online research.

There is already a Drupal showcase / case studies site with its own domain name.

See: http://www.drupalshowcase.com/

It is created / managed / owned by Acquia. (In other words, it is a marketing tool for Acquia)

drupalshowcase.com is in very-very good shape:

- it tells me right away I can have confidence in Drupal
- on the top slider: National Geographic, NBC, Al Jazeera, Warner, Amnesty International, etc.
- it archives (I guess) nearly every known Drupal site online
- a web author / owner can submit a new site
- the user interface is very easy to understand and navigate

westend atelier’s picture

It seems to me the challenge for case studies at Drupal.org is to create something that at least equals drupalshowcase.com (eg, demonstrating the implementation of Drupal); while, ideally, building on what has already been done and adding something unique.

westend atelier’s picture

"Drupal.org Content Strategy needs a plan"

See:

http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupalorg-content
http://drupal.org/node/1113574
http://drupal.org/node/1133434

------------------------

Perhaps, Content Strategy needs to be more developed before moving ahead with Case Studies.

tvn’s picture

@westend atelier, yes there is a drupalshowcase managed by Acquia, however we are building our own space here on drupal.org for those people who come here to evaluate Drupal, see what it can do and understand how it can help in their specific situation. And also a space for our community members to share sites they've built. We decided to not just showcase sites, but to make this section more educational, we encourage detailed write-ups of the projects, including technical details. We want not only to show what can be build with Drupal, but also to tell how it can be done.

Yes, there is a content strategy initiative however we have very limited resources so have to pick our priorities.

If you would like to help us with Case Studies initiative right now there are 2 things you could do:
1. Join Case Studies review team and help us populate Featured section. See announcement: https://association.drupal.org/node/16223
2. Help us migrate existing case studies to new content type. This is postponed now since I am contacting original authors of case studies, we will have a list of case studies to migrate in a week or two.

We also discuss new taxonomy for case studies at #1496952: Add new 'Functional area' taxonomy for case studies and #1588910: Update taxonomy for case studies, I saw you had some ideas for taxonomy before you edited your comment.

Lastly you can join us next Monday during Drupal.org office hours at IRC (channel #drupal-infrastructure 18:00-19:00 UTC) and discuss any ideas/questions you have.

tvn’s picture

Status: Needs work » Closed (fixed)

Since we already evaluated old case studies I'm closing this issue for not to confuse anyone. All further instructions on how to help with migration will be posted in 2 issues: #1429412: List out and migrate best case studies from 'Drupal showcase forum' to new Case study content type and #372039: List out and migrate case studies from book pages to new Case study content type.

westend atelier’s picture

@tvn

Thanks for the feedback.

I've followed your links.

I'm new to Drupal and will need some time to understand what's going on with Case Studies at drupal.org

westend atelier’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

Added step to unpublish migrated studies.