Julio: Documentation, a Demo Site, and Support

In early March, 2012, we released our initial version of Julio, a web site designed for K-12 schools, school districts, and departments within universities. Since that initial release, we have been working on various improvements to Julio. All of these improvements have gone back into the community, and are freely available for everyone to use.

From the outset, we wanted to make it easy to use Julio. We implemented this goal in several ways, including:

• Creating a custom installer that helps people configure commonly used elements of the site during the install process;
• Creating a simpler interface for enabling and disabling functionality;
• Making it simple to change selected style options;
• Creating custom administrative screens that hide unneeded complexity from people; and
• Shipping with a theme and design that is responsive, and built to work on mobile devices;

However, ease of use (as we understand it) also involves documentation, so people using Julio have a resource to learn more if and when questions arise. To help address this need, we worked with Kelly O'Brien to create an initial set of documentation for Julio. We will be adding to this documentation in the days, weeks, and months ahead, but we intentionally made the decision to host this documentation on drupal.org rather than on FunnyMonkey.com because we don't see this documentation as something that is "ours." We care about it, we put a lot of time and resources into getting it started, but we created this so other people can take it, use it, extend it, and make it better.

And, just as the documentation for Julio is freely available on drupal.org, so is all you need to install Julio. Over the last several years, there has been some incredible work leading up to major improvements in hosting distributions. Over the years, there have also been a lot of conversations about the role of drupal.org within the larger Drupal ecosystem, and for us, it was a simple choice: drupal.org is the heart of the community, the people who put time and effort into maintaining and improving drupal.org are phenomenally talented, and we wanted our work to be available as a part of that community, from within that community.

We have also created a group on groups.drupal.org for people who are using or looking to extend Julio. The group is currently in the moderation queue pending approval, and once (fingers crossed) the group is approved I'll update this post.

In addition to the codebase improvements, bug fixes, group space, and documentation, we also have created a demo site for people to try out Julio. Please log in and take a look around.

As mentioned earlier, Julio is freely available. But, for those who want help getting started with Julio, extending Julio, maintaining Julio, or making sure that Julio supports a larger communications and outreach vision, we also offer a full range support services.

Currently, Julio is a development release. We tend to be pretty conservative with our point releases; we have been using Julio internally for several months, but we also have the advantage of a tightly controlled environment. The roadmap for a point release is in the issue queue

If you have any questions on any of this, please get in touch, leave a comment, or join the group, and we'll move forward from there. But, more than anything, install Julio and have some fun with it. We had a good time building this site, and we hope you have a good time using it.