Reinventing International Development With Rapid Drupal Development

The Global Innovation Exchange is a community of innovators, funders, researchers, and smart people dedicated to improving and fundamentally changing how international development works. The platform's design and Drupal development now connects the best ideas in international development directly with the resources they need for them to become a reality. 

Built on Drupal 7 and Autoscaled on AWS, Forum One was able to ensure that as the Global Innovation community grew that Drupal was able to handle the traffic. A robust site built using features such as integrated Solr search with enhanced More Like This, Long form content authoring, and the ability to quickly spin up microsites for Exchange partners. 

Utilizing Pattern Lab for creating real-time designs that the client (USAID's Innovation Lab and DAI) was able to review allowed us to implement a large scale theme within 2 weeks -  something quite unheard of in the traditional Drupal theming community. Integrating Pattern Lab within the theme structure allows for continuous development and deployment as new feature requests are proposed. 

The Exchange community quickly grew to more than 3,000 users, with 1,000 of those joining in the first two months after the open beta release in September 2015. More than 350 member organizations and counting are using the Exchange to support hundreds of innovations that are changing the face of international development. 

This session will cover:

• Rapid Drupal Development: creating a powerful platform in just 100 days
• Using Pattern Lab to create real-time designs
• Using Solr search with enhanced More Like This, Long form content authoring, and microsites

Level of knowledge required to attend: this session caters to both beginner and advanced users of Drupal.