Drupal at Itaipu: Latin America Case Study

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nickvidal's picture

This is a case study I presented at Latinoware 2012, one of the top FOSS events in Latin America. This event happens every October at Itaipu's Technology Park, situated inside the Itaipu Dam.

The Itaipu Dam is the world's largest generator of renewable clean energy and is considered to be one of the seven modern Wonders of the World.

Background

Last year, I was the main organizer of DrupalCamp Foz, that took place in conjunction with Latinoware 2011. We had the honor to receive Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and Rasmus Lerdorf, the founder of PHP. Itaipu is a big advocate of FOSS, and they use Drupal in many of their projects.

Since DrupalCamp Foz, I have kept a close eye on Itaipu. By the end of the year, they made a public Request for Proposals for their Agua Project. I was very much interested in this project, so my company participated in the RFP and we were selected to create their website.

The Agua Project

Agua means Water both in Spanish and Portuguese. It comes from the Latin 'Acqua'. That's where the inspiration for the name of Dries' company (Acquia) came from.

Itaipu promotes several initiatives around 5 themes: Energy, Environment, Social Responsibility, Tourism, and Technology. The Agua Project is an Environmental initiative to promote knowledge about Water all across Latin America. The project's goal is to reach 10.000 people directly and 300.000 people indirectly by providing free courses using both traditional and distance education. These range from basic courses where children learn about the importance of water till more advanced courses where engineers learn about Dam security, for example.

The Agua Project Website

My company was responsible for creating their main website, where people could read information about the project and enroll in the courses. To provide a responsive design, I used the Adaptive Theme. This allows the website to be viewed from both the Desktop and Mobile.

The Agua Project website has three main sections: Courses, Press, and Virtual Library.

The Courses Section

The Agua Project is composed of 24 different courses, with a total of 236 classes offered both in Portuguese and Spanish. Each class has an Enrollment Period. Classes within this period are automatically shown in a special place of the website. Since many different classes could be open for enrollments at the same time, I used the Views Accordion module to help displaying these.

The Press Section

The Agua Project website has a section for the Press, where we show news, newsletters, clippings, press-releases, and images. Each one of these is a content type. For Images, I used the Colorbox module to provide an overlay.

The Virtual Library Section

The Virtual Library is a space for teachers and students to share Documents, Presentations, Images, Video, and Audio. For both the Video and Audio, I used the jPlayer Module. Users can comment and vote on each one of these.

Conclusion

The Agua Project has a very important mission, which is to help disseminate education about Water all over Latin America. My company had the honor to make a small contribution towards this mission, and Drupal has helped us in creating the website for the project.

The use of Drupal was very appropriate, and the fact that Drupal is represented by a water drop just makes it all more compelling. The individual water drops might be small, but by coming together they can create a beautiful waterfall. It's through the continuous aggregation of these small contributions that we can build a better world!

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Contributed Modules

nickvidal's picture

For more information about the Modules used in this project, please see:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/263953

The article above provides an overview of Drupal's top 25+ modules.

Brasil

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