Drupal is the popular, open source, content management system that we use to run Clear Night Sky and numerous web sites for our clients. In a few weeks UC Berkeley will be hosting a two day Drupal camp from 9am to 6pm on the weekend of November 3rd. The event is free and open to everyone. There are currently around 100 registrants. Visit the Bay Area Drupal Camp web site for more information.

1. IA expert designs a beautiful, well thought out site map in Microsoft Visio leveraging industry best practices and the web site sponsor's business objectives.
   
   
2. Site map goes to the sponsor, there might be a few rounds of revisions but basically they love it, and say "Great start building it out. We'll write the content."
   
   
3. Large amounts of work by the graphic design and technical staff building toward the site map.
   
   
4. 10,000 years elapse, business objectives change, best practices are revised, great civilizations rise and fall.
   
   
5. Content finally shows up and it consists of 475 faxes, 280 Word documents and around 400 GB of photos and low resolution logos in weird file formats that only open on old Commodore 64s. All of which have no relation to the original beautiful, well thought out site map.
   
   
6. Hilarity ensues, everything is slammed together as quickly as possible to meet a deadline and nobody is amused with the final product.

1. Dump all of the copy, images, and other files into Drupal as pages and attachments.
   
   
2. The IA Expert can start developing a realistic information architecture using Drupal's menuing system. For sections that don't have content yet, they can build empty pages that just say things like "JOE IS WRITING THIS PAGE" in bold, red text. After this step you have something resembling a web site.
   
   
3. Let the nit-picking begin! Create user accounts for everyone in the sponsor's organization who could possibly help. Let them use Drupal's commenting features to say things like "HEY, THIS PAGE HAS THE WRONG PHONE NUMBER!" or let them make edits to the pages directly. Be sure to remove all of those "development comments" before the site goes live (unless you want the public to know what happens in the kitchen) and also don't forget to use Drupal's revision tracking feature, so you can roll back any edits that the chief sponsor doesn't agree with.
   
   
4. Wow, the content is starting to looking good, but with the deadline approaching it's time for you and the sponsor to do a content freeze, evaluate what's there and make a realistic triage plan for the work that is left. This is also a great time to get the graphic designers and developers involved, so they can start creating templates and working on the technical underpinnings. Like I said before, there is a huge community of module developers and template designers that can help with customization.
   
   
5. Launch the web site and turn over the keys to the sponsor. You won't need to spend hours training them on the administrative tools, because they have been involved making edits from day one. Now when the CEO decides that they don't like their photo, you won't get a panicked phone call, because they will know how to log in and change it themselves.