About Luggage

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Luggage was a platform for creating websites, targeted at academic websites for departments and researchers.

Note: Luggage has been superseded by the ISU Sites+ platform.

The platform is built on Drupal and consists of features that come with configuration. For example, the People feature contains a prebuilt content type appropriate for displaying a group of people divided into subgroups of your own choosing (faculty, staff, etc.) along with a view. Here's an example.

The goal is to quickly leverage common use cases so that web developers can be empowered to get sites up and running quickly but maintain the ability to customize features or add additional features.

Luggage is an open source project available on Github at https://github.com/isubit/ and contributions are welcome. Luggage uses git to provide version control and ensure that all parts work together. The following diagram demonstrates the relationship of Drupal, Luggage and Luggage_ISU.

If you want to start working with Luggage, you should fork https://github.com/isubit/luggage_isu which is itself a fork of Luggage.

Luggage upstream and downstream

Goals and Design Philosophy

1. Collaborate with others. Luggage is built on open-source projects and has an open mindset.

2. Use upstream sources when possible. If there is a patch for a bug fix that is absolutely needed but is not yet in upstream, use it reluctantly and remove it when upstream contains the patch.

3. Cleanly separate features. Effort is taken to ensure that features do not depend on one another so that you can pick and choose the features that are right for you. Features are typically developed in their own, separate git repository and brought in as git submodules.

4. Ship sane default configuration. Much time is spent mucking about trying to configure Drupal; avoid this by preconfiguring with sane defaults.

5. Focus on metadata. Metadata (vocabularies, tagging, categories, ontology) provides the true power of content management.

6. Provide opportunity for customization. Whenever possible we do not hardcode, assume, or railroad.

7. Be mainstream. Luggage uses git to assemble a modular system that can be cleanly customized and overridden.

Why Luggage Instead of Drupal?

Luggage is Drupal. It is a well-configured, nicely featured Drupal. You can add Drupal modules. You can write your own modules. You can even convert an existing Drupal site to Luggage.

Luggage's Default Theme: Suitcase

Luggage_ISU includes Suitcase, a responsive theme that complies with Iowa State University's visual identity system.

Slides from "Presenting Luggage" Talk at WebSIG, August 2014

Presenting Luggage

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