When taking on a web project, we want all people involved to feel happy with the project, from the client, sales, project managers, all the way to the developer. In a lot of cases the discovery and development process starts fresh for each project, and with a lot of project specific details. This makes each project a lot of work to build out. We too often start planning out the project, looking at the specific content types, or pages, with too much detail - missing the similarities of the different pieces of content.

We can learn a lot from how physical items are manufactured, and on how using reusable parts can make a product cheaper, flexible, and even more maintainable.

When we streamline multiple Content Types, Views, and Blocks, we can simplify the development and administrative experience. We can make this happen using tools such as Taxonomy based Panels and Views arguments, View Modes, and more. When you use these tools to build Reusable elements for the site, you can give more power to your client, and make your site a lot easier to plan, develop, and theme.

I will show you some concepts for creating and managing these components, and how they can help in estimation, design, planning, and keeping everyone happy. Not only will your site development be super awesome and efficient, but you will be able to plan and build components for all levels of the project that could be reused throughout the process.

How much can you benefit from this concept? We will look at the sales, strategy, and planning of a project, and how the use of components can ease stress and lock down features. From there we will cover the development process, seeing how the clarity in feature set of the components will keep the focus on deployment and customization of the items to meet the needs of the specific project. Finally the client support after delivery, we will look into how the use of the reusable elements will make updates and documentation clearer.