Building community with Drupal: Durham Atlético, a case study

People are wondering whether Drupal 8 is ready for putting complex websites into production. My answer is a resounding "yes!" and is based on my current experience building out the web presence for Durham Atlético in Drupal 8.

In this session I'll present durhamatletico.com as a case study of a successful Drupal 8 build that went from zero [1] to production in one week [2], and that has brought together a community of several hundred players and fans in a rapidly growing futsal league in Durham, NC. The website coordinates our communication with our players who hail from 22 different countries, speak dozens of languages, and come from all walks of life.

I'll walk through how I built the following features with core Drupal 8 functionality and a small amount of (open source) custom code:

• Online registration and payment for the league, a simple CMS for payment records, jersey and team info, age, contact info, all easy to locate via user entities and a registration content type
• Multilingual site experience
• Easy to update game schedule and automatic updates to standings and goal tracking statistics
• Quick wins for improving admin experience in data entry
• Using Views REST mode for building tournament brackets
• Adding structured data to your site with RDF
• RSVP functionality to improve game attendance
• SMS functionality for schedule updates

You'll get the most out of this session if you:

• Are interested in using Drupal to build real-world communities
• Have some site building experience and have a little custom module experience
• Want to know how to build a community (sports) site in Drupal 8

By the end of the session, you'll have a good idea of what it takes to build something like Durham Atlético's website, what the highs and lows of building in Drupal 8 are, what core and contrib modules you can leverage right now, and how to build quickly yet avoid breaking anything.

I also hope you'll be inspired to go out and build your own community site!

Footnotes

1. Well, from a static site managed with Jekyll.
2. With many iterative improvements that followed.