slides (and now video!) from my Design 4 Drupal session on Schoolyard

I have a talk at #D4DBoston (http://boston2011.design4drupal.org) this past weekend, and wanted to make sure my slides are available. I was truly gratified by the audience - even though it was at 9am on Sunday! Thanks so much to everyone who came, and for all the great questions.

Taking on Goliath: Schoolyard & Drupal in the school web site market

The independent school web site marketplace is full of companies selling sites to schools based in proprietary CMSs that come with astronomical price tags: often $50,000 for design and development and $15,000 or more every year in licensing for even the most basic of sites. Schoolyard used to be one of them until 2007, when the original platform was sold to one of the other companies in the market in 2007. 

In 2010, I started working with Mark at Schoolyard designing a platform based in Drupal to see if we could come up with something that had the features, extensibility and scale that could turn that market on its head - and it’s working. We’ve launched 6 sites and have 9 more that will be live by the time DrupalCon London rolls around for schools around the US and as far away as Amman, Jordan.

I’ll talk about what has made it possible, including module selection, LESS CSS in our theming, the (thankfully rare) custom module development and more - all allowing us to design and deliver great sites to schools for a third of the cost, with even more features and functionality than ever possible. The best outcome of all? Most of the budget goes to design and architecture, allowing us to ensure that when you’ve seen one Schoolyard site, well, you’ve seen ONE Schoolyard site. And that couldn’t happen without Drupal as the foundation.