Organising an event? Make its website in Droopler!

31.07.2018

An event website can be a big challenge. Usually, you will have to do it quickly and cheaply, while ensuring its high quality. After all, the prestige of the event and, consequently, the high turnout of guests and visitors, depends directly on its quality. How to reconcile a tight budget with great quality? If you are looking for a good solution to this conundrum, you can go with Droopler, Droptica’s distribution based on Drupal.

The event industry is characterised by many contradictions. The organisers are aware of the fact that they create something temporary, but at the same time, they use their experience for each subsequent event. It is wise for them to use tools and resources that will last them longer than just one season. The same principle applies to websites. Choosing the right CMS can significantly reduce the cost of deploying further websites. This is why it is worth going with Droopler.

What is Droopler?

Droopler is a free and open distribution of Drupal 8. It combines ease of use with a broad range of expansion possibilities.

While creating various business and corporate websites for our clients we found ourselves creating very similar components over and over again. Eventually, we decided to create a base. That is how Droopler came to be.

Droopler is different from other similar solutions that after installation you get a ready-made website pre-filled with content (you can see its demo right now). After all, changing existing content is much easier and faster than creating everything from scratch. This way of making websites also works well in the case of event sites. If, for example, you are organising a classical music festival, it will take you only a few minutes of fiddling and adjusting to achieve this result:

Beethoven festival 2018 - a screenshot of main site with menu, logo and call to action button. Blurred image of the orchestra is inserted as a background

Impressive, isn’t it? By default, you get a modern, responsive layout, with a user-friendly content management system “underneath.” Creating banners, text blocks, galleries and forms are similar to building blocks here. There is no need to look into the HTML code at all. After a short training, everybody will be able to add new subpages and their components.

Is it possible to expand the website with new elements?

Please note that Droopler is not a trivially simple distribution. After all, it is based on Drupal 8, which is a very complex framework that offers endless possibilities for modification. This is why it is ideally suited for the event industry.

Every event has its own requirements. It is sometimes necessary to implement an extensive agenda, launch ticket sales, publish news, integrate with external services or, for example, receive applications from participants. All this can be implemented in a relatively short timeframe, and in a way that allows everything to be reused in future projects.

Therefore, you are not limited to a few basic elements to choose from if you want to edit your content. An example of this is the website of DrupalCamp 2018, a conference organised by Droptica. On the basis of several basic Drupal functionalities (content types, views and taxonomy) we have created an extensive subpage for the programme, available in two languages. Editing it is so simple that it can be delegated to almost anyone who has had at least minimal contact with Drupal:

How to stand out?

The functionality of a website is not everything, because design also matters. Droopler offers the same template for all pages built in it; however, this does not mean that every page will look the same.

A bit of knowledge of SCSS is enough to completely change the look of your website. We have designed an architecture in which only a few lines of code need to be written to adjust basic colours and parameters. Thanks to this, you can quickly change the look of your website without wasting a lot of time on it. This is very important if you want to emphasise individuality.

The extent of the modifications depends only on your budget. Of course, nothing stops you from using the default template. With the right selection of photos, you can definitely give it a personal touch, just like on the example festival website presented above.

How to reuse a website?

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, reusing resources to organise future events can save you a lot of money and time. So why not copy an existing website and then adapt its content and appearance to the new requirements?

Droopler favours this approach. A few small changes in the template files can drastically change the visual layer of the page, while a simple way to edit content will allow for a painless update. Any additional functionalities that may be required will continue to work. The next event’s website will be created in almost no time and at minimal cost.

What happens after the event?

Once the dust has settled after the event, the website is no longer needed, but sometimes you might want to keep it up as a memento. Leaving your website unattended and without updates on a server will never end well – regardless of the technology you use.

The best way out of this situation is to convert the website to pure HTML code, resistant to outside attacks. This can be done using httrack software, available for Windows and Linux. Currently, Droopler’s standard distribution is fully compatible with httrack, and this support will continue in future versions as well.

The archived site does not require any further attention from the organiser. What is more, making any changes in the future is still possible, if somewhat difficult.