The Startup America Partnership Launches in Two Weeks Using OpenPublic
We were thrilled to learn recently that OpenPublic was chosen as the content management system for the White House's campaign to celebrate entrepreneurship throughout the nation.
And behind the effort is the Startup America Partnership (SUAP), a private-sector alliance that's aimed at maximizing the success of American startups.
We chatted with Will Grana with the Case Foundation to find out why SUAP chose OpenPublic to manage the campaign's content and how the platform has been working for them so far.
Q. What made you choose OpenPublic as the CMS to work with for this campaign?
A: We knew going into the project that we’d be working with a short development cycle, so we needed a scalable and feature-rich distribution platform. OpenPublic fit that bill and, with its excellent module integration, it saved us so much time.
Additionally, we felt a parallel between the philosophy of the Startup America Partnership and OpenPublic. Both are public-private partnerships that promote and integrate the energy and ideas of the crowd to foster innovation.
Q. What kind of response from entrepreneurs and partners have you had to the site so far?
A: We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to both the look and feel of the site. However, there’s still a lot of work left to do to growing the site into the kind of resource we envision.
Q. You have new content going up almost daily. How difficult has it been to manage content updates on the site? And related to that, how much training did your team receive?
A. The content management system is so intuitive that our primary content manager -- who has no prior background in Drupal -- had no problem learning how to use the system quickly.
Our entire team had next-to-no training; only one of us had any prior exposure to Drupal 7 or OpenPublic. Everybody else had to take advantage of the intuitive user interface to teach themselves as they designed, themed, and populated the site.
Yet we found it incredibly easy to do everything from laying blocks to inputting and formatting video to aggregating external content. The system is light enough to learn as you go.
Q. Your site looks very different from the two theming options that come out-of-the-box with OpenPublic. How difficult was it for your team to create a unique look and feel for the site?
A. Credit goes to our two external themers, Francis Tiberio and Joshua Beshad, who, once acclimated to OpenPublic, made quick and effective modifications to the basic theme to give the site its unique feel.
Q. How long did it take your team to build the site?
A. About two weeks from start to finish.
Q. Can you describe some of the main challenges you were confronted with in this project and how you overcame them?
A. We had an aggressive timeline and big goals for architecture and theme. With that timeline, we couldn’t really afford to make mistakes and undergo multiple deep revisions of the site. Starting with the OpenPublic distribution gave us a huge leg up on the architecture for the site and saved us a lot of development time.
In addition to the out-o- the-box features, its UI allowed us to get lots of help from non-developers on our team to design and implement the site. Of course, the most vital component was the tireless work from our team.
Q. What are your favorite features on the site?
A. We’re really excited about the Apps functionality. We had actually hoped to launch with Ideation in place, but ran out of time to customize and message it for our purposes. So we now hope to include it in our next round of updates to the site.
Another great tool for our site is Acquia’s Apache Solr and its faceted search functionality. As the site grows to the proportions we imagine, that kind of search functionality will allow users to take advantage of all the resources we offer.
Q. Is there anything else you would like to add?
A. We just want to offer our thanks to the Drupal community for its awesome work on Drupal 7 and its excellent mods. Thanks also to Phase2 for the OpenPublic distribution that saved us so much time and work and to Acquia for its responsive support during the development. And, of course, thanks to the entire Case Foundation and Startup America Partnership team.
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