Open Social, Drupal 8 Distribution

GoalGorilla was interested in investing in developing a Drupal 8 social network distribution because we had build a custom Drupal 7 solution for Greenpeace. And we could see, how generalizing and modernizing to Drupal 8 could benefit many more organizations.

Goals

Open Social empowers people to effectively collaborate and organize. Replacing traditional intranets, it fuels efficiency and creativity. It supports organizations to innovate bottom-up instead of top-down. The Open Social distribution exists to lay a flexible groundwork to meet these goals. In order to do so the Open Social distribution must have:

• World-class ease of use (on all devices)
• Blazing fast (perceived) speed
• Flexible customization and configuration (branding, integrations etc.)

We welcome and invite the (Drupal) open-source community to give feedback on the Open Social Manifesto.

Hours spent

From January to May 2016, GoalGorilla spent about 2,000 back-end development hours, 650 hours of interaction design, 500 hours graphical design, and 600 hours front-end development. We also invested a whole bunch of hours, sweat, and tears in the Scrum Master and Product Owner agile roles. Many people on our team are also working evenings and weekends on the platform.

Team process

We try to stay as agile as possible using the Scrum method. We use an internal Product Owner who acts like the client. Our marketing department acts as the Stakeholder. We have a Scrum Master who makes sure we follow all Scrum principles, meetings are attended, agendas are set, and impediments removed. This does not differ much from our normal client work, except in Open Social we have a bit more space to experiment. For example, we started with the design team (interaction, visual, and front-end) working on stories for the development team. But we noticed input from the back-end developers was important early on when making design decisions. So, in the current Sprints we include both designers and developers writing stories and tasks together.

Approach to the Design

Getting the interface right is a huge challenge. We want to make the distribution look really good out of the box and also have a theme that is customizable to an organization's brand.

Also, to make Open Social's interface intuitively understandable for a wide range of users we use Google’s Material Design principles, and as a base theme we use Twitter’s Bootstrap. Open Social is built on Drupal 8 too, so we want to stay close to existing Drupal Core and Drupal modules usability patterns. But the users of Open Social are probably used to certain conventions from existing social software they already use. A small example is the Group icon that Google uses for 'Groups', in Facebook this same icon means 'Friends'. So, when testing with real users (which we do each Sprint) the users were confused and we had to redesign a new Group icon.

Tooling

Project Management

Our most important project management tool is Atlassian Jira (with Tempo and X-Ray add-ons). For internal team communication, we use Slack, and Skype for video conferencing. For resource planning, the team uses Timewax. Google Docs is our favorite when it comes to writing down more extensive research.

Design

We use Axure for low fidelity prototyping. For visual designs, we use Illustrator. The front-end is done from a components strategy, which means building a living style guide based on the atomic design principle. We use Gulp for automated front-end development tasks, and Jade for rapid, high fidelity prototyping.

Development

Wow, tools and frameworks are really exploding these days :). Some of our favorites we used for this project are: Docker, Composer, GitHub, Behat, Drush, Drupal Console, PHP Code Sniffer, PhpStorm, and MailCatcher.