Drupal Starter Kit

The problem

Every new Penn Drupal site was starting from zero — the same decisions re-litigated, the same accessibility bugs re-introduced, the same abandoned internal tools passed around because there was nothing better.

The work

A starter kit: a set of components, some content types, and enough guidance to get a team onto a brochure site without inventing their own conventions first.

The argument I made to leadership was not “this saves us time.” It was that a team at any Penn school should be able to start from something maintained, rather than from whatever was lying around. And for anything more creative, you deviate — but you deviate from a good default instead of from nothing.

The governance question

The interesting design decision was ownership. ISC has to govern it, because somebody has to keep it alive. But the intent is that it behaves like an open-source project: community-built, community-contributed, with ISC as steward rather than author.

I brought it to the Community of Practice before it was finished, precisely because a kit nobody helped design is a kit nobody adopts. The room told us what they actually needed, and the roadmap changed.