Create the WOW Factor with Drupal - Part 2 of 5

Yesterday, we began this series with a short introduction to creating the wow factor on a Drupal website. Today we'll look in a bit more detail at (drum roll) ...

The Technical Aspect

You should always try to think about your client's requirements in new ways. For example, you need to present information to visitors detailing historical events. What way could you do this differently? Or better? A favourite of mine is timeline.js. Timeline provides a very slick way to present a collection of disparate media separated by time or date values. It can be a very impactful presentation tool.

Drupal provides us with a host of advanced tools to facilitate wow. Imagine using OpenLayers to let a user mark out a shape on a map and saving that shape for use elsewhere on the site. It could handle rooms, parishes, counties, constituencies... the possibilities are widespread.

You don't even need to go as far as something as complicated as OpenLayers. Entity Reference, whilst standard fare for a Drupal developer, allows you to build incredibly complex data structures that is simply amazing to someone used to the Post and Page limitations of Wordpress.

Third party integrations can also make people really go 'oh wow, I love it'. For example, taxonomy vocabularies are often used to categorise your content. It is often a hard choice to make whether to allow users the flexibility of free tagging, or to limit them by a more maintainable fixed, closed set of terms. Imagine, as in one project upon which I had the pleasure of working, that you could utilize Google's fantastic online database of well known people, places and things as your controlled vocabulary? Imagine, as you type a taxonomy term on your new node, that you are presented with suggestions from Freebase, and that upon selecting your term, the site gains access to all the data and metadata associated with that term.

Now that will blow your mind.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 3: Aesthetic

Image credits:
Timline: https://world.time.com/2013/12/05/nelson-mandelas-extraordinary-life-an-interactive-timeline/
Freebase: https://www.link-assistant.com/blog/want-more-exposure-for-your-online-business-get-listed-in-googles-freebase-step-by-step-guide/

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