Presented on Sunday, 26 June, 2011 at Design 4 Drupal

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.