Drupal in Education -- BoF notes

Tuesday, March 4th, 1:45 to 3:15

We'll be having a followup BoF Thursday morning at 9:00 AM. All interested parties, we'll see you there.

These notes were taken during the session by John Jones, with some minor notes added in after the fact.

AUTHENTICATION

LDAP integration -- problems getting ldap_provisioning to work.

CAS working with D6, mediawiki, others. Single sign on solution. Available on Drupal.org (CAS_auth)

Also Pubcookie.

Shibboleth -- Is anyone using? Some thinking about it, not quite using it yet. Some using it outside of Drupal. Allows you to plug in other authetication systems. Hands off LDAP fields.

Open ID? Some thinking about it, no one is using it yet. Open ID is nice, but no one is using it yet.

PKI - Small facet of openID. Client side authentication. Can be attached to the same LDAP server.

THEMING STRATEGIES

Can we have as much control over the look and feel of the web site when we move to a CMS solution like Drupal. Some have department specific templates within college sites. Templates can be specified by URL path, taxonomy, etc. Lots of choices, but it's hard to pick the "right" one.

Theoretically, all solutions are equal. Content types can be a good solution. Performance isn't really better with one or the other, unless you're messing with logic, etc.

One solution is to give the designers the CSS file in a strong template (Zen, or others) and have them code to the existing theme's CSS. Subthemes can help, because you keep your core theme intact. A third option is to include some fucntions in the template.php.

Themes people are using -- Hunchbaque.

Book: Drupal 5 theming.

Module -- ThemesettingsAPI. Roomple themes uses a variety of color options in the themesettingsAPI module.

MODULES

OG, Acidfree, LDAP, CCK, Views, Views Fastsearch, OG roles, SMTP, MIME Mailer, Simplenews, Scheduler, Multisite Manager, Signup, Book Expand

Event vs. CCK Date/Views Calendars. Some folks are using google calendars or other solutions. The Event/CCK choice seems to be largely a question of preference, although most of us at the table doing calendars through Drupal are using CCK/Views.

Information Architecture Strategies for large sites -- OG, Taxonomy, Multisites ?

Depends largely on the type of site, and choices will probably depend on specific requirements. Some have departments that are very protective of their content and want to be sure that they are not mixed in with the general population.

Using just prefixes for many sites in a single DB does present a performance hit.

Unscratched Itches . . . What needs do we have . . .

Note: I put a comment on the Libraries BoF thread to highlight that there are some areas of common interest. This is a connection that could be mutually beneficial.

Library-ish integration. Some solutions are on the way.

Scorm - Shareable Content Object Relationship Model. (?) very dense spec, very imprecise. Not much fun to work with, but some of us need to deal with us. Poor poor people . . .
Is there a group? Yes. Drupaled group. Also a drupal in research and academia group. As part of the consensus in this meeting, the description and title of the group was changed to make it more of a place for general questions about using Drupal in Education.

WEB SITE showcases

http://elearning.psu.edu/projects

http://ywpvt.org

http://edutopia.org

A demo of the Multisite Manager in action.