About us

Storytelling and ‘semantics’

Sites usually have marketing pages to tell your brand story using text, images, and other fancy components. These make up 5-10% of the total content, with the rest being posts and other serialized content.

The details are different, like colors and fonts and whatnot, but the ingredients list is similar.

On top of that are semantics — content that means something, and should be stored specially so the meaning can be used for functionality. Sure, you can write in the middle of a paragraph that an event starts at 7:00 PM on Sunday and anybody who reads it will know the information, but the website doesn't know how to read the middle of a paragraph in order to put the event in the right place on a calendar.

That's where Drupal's concept of entities and fields comes in. In frost the storytelling pieces are refreshingly ready to go, so you can focus on building out the semantics that mean something to your brand.

How frost is different

This is a very chill website, but frost was born from searing pain.

If you've worked on website projects before, there are some common themes that give you grey hairs:

Optimistic scope and aggressive timeline
UX, Design, and Development not being on the same page
Generating lots of designs and documents that get the client excited for the project, but get thrown away in the end and might give a false impression of the end product
Not being able to show the client their new website until the very end, so they don't have time to learn to use it and provide actionable feedback
Some flavor of Agilefall methodology, where you want to be one but know you're really the other
When you get to testing and there isn't time to fix things correctly, so you hard-code in technical debt that haunts you post-launch
Everybody is beyond busy, so the senior backend developer doesn't have enough time to make sure the junior frontend developer is doing things right
Not applying lessons learned and cool features from yesterday's project to today's project. Treating every project like it needs to be baked from scratch
Giving up on useful tools like automated testing almost immediately because they're not in the critical path
Oops! Didn't find out until after launch that the fancy new site is slow to load and impossible to use for differently-abled users

With frost, turn your process upside-down and see what falls out

There's no law that says you have to make the same website mistakes over and over, but... to change the process you have to change the software (a bit):

If you stick to components and other Paragraphs, the front-end and content modeling work for projects using frost can be rightfully optimistic
When everybody on the team (including the client!) works on the website itself, it's clearer to everyone what's ready to go and what needs work, and there ends up fewer 'artifacts' like wireframe PDFs headed to trash cans. And wireframes can be real-world tests rather than hypotheticals
If not the very first day, by the end of the first sprint you've got working software the whole team can iterate on
When you start from solid fundamentals, the work you do can be focused on doing things right rather than fast. That makes it more likely you can make things reusable for your next project or for giving back to the frost community
Even if you don't write any more automated tests, the starting point is enough testing to feel confident in what you're launching
frost tries hard to get performance and accessibility right. Nobody's perfect, but you're working from a strong starting point

That's what frost is: a strong starting point

Where do you go from here?

Once you've cloned the codebase and installed frost — thank you, by the way — your first sprint can look like this:

Change the site name from frost and drop in your logo
Swap the contact information from the helpful "Contact info" admin page
Tweak the values in the theme's settings.css (yes, edit the custom theme directly, we don't mess with subthemes around here) to match your colors, fonts, and mood
Edit the existing content for the Home, About, and other pages as desired. No need to start from scratch on any of these; you know the site's going to have a blog listing page and a Privacy Policy and stuff, so they're there and ready for you to tweak
Set up logins for the team, perhaps including the client Product Owner if you're bold
Begin project and sprint planning as a team, determining the site-specific content, IA, functionality, and other pieces to tack on
Continue with content and design while the developers work in parallel
Deliver working software every couple weeks, the way your romantic heart has always dreamed

Hop on the bandwagon

Whether spooling up a dev site on platform.sh or cloning the code for a local lando-based build, frost aims to be an easy installation.

View on drupal.org Code on GitHub

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