Case Study: Davis Applied Technology College

Our accreditors require that the information be accurate or else we lose that "accredited by" tag-line. Fortunately they only do a run-through once, maybe twice a year to ensure that everything is correct. On the other hand, our programs change quite often so it must be as current as possible. With that in mind we have individuals in our college that are in charge of keeping things up to date, and current. There is a team of maybe two people that will control updating the specific program changes.

Andrew (amariotti)

Great! Thanks for the comments! Let me know if you have any questions regarding the way that we did things. Even details on the project from start to finish might be beneficial, unless you've already had some experience with it.

My experience was pretty good, but very stressful at the end. The launch has been pretty rough too, only because a lot of people are coming to me saying, "so where did this go!?" We tried to prevent this by sending e-mails, official memos, holding meetings, but you can never get everything. I'm guessing that I'll be working on that for a few weeks before everyone is pleased with the result.

Andrew (amariotti)

Well here's a quick run-down:

Home Page:
The home page was quite a bit of work. I ended up using a Slideshow that I found online. I'm drawing a blank here, so I will post it when I remember what it's called. Anyway, I had to hard code it into my page-front.tpl.php file to get it up and running. It's a pretty slick slideshow so I will see if I can find it and post it here. I used the slideshow on the main slideshow as well as the rotating button on the right side underneath it. We tried to get the timing just right so that they would never sync up... if you watch it long enough it does :).

Program Pages:
I created a content type called "program_pages" that housed all of the data for each of the programs. CCK was able to get me pretty close to where I needed to be when it came to the different elements. The main difficult that I had was with the data for each course on the bottom of each Program page. I found a module called tablemanager that was a true winner for what I needed to do. Tablemanager allowed me to import (csv) and create tables out of my data from an excel file. The cool thing about tablemanager is that I can then control who has access to edit these tables inline. When I give them access an "edit" and "delete" (if rights are given) link is added to the right side of that specific row to manage the data. There's also an "Add new entry" link placed at the bottom of each table to add more rows. This wasn't the easiest thing to do, but I think the result has met my expectations for the initial launch. As far as the "Quick Facts" block is concerned—I used contemplate to display teaser data using a Views block (with an argument to display the current node only). This enabled us to isolate the important details about the programs outside of the main content. It cut down on the clutter in the main content area, so it was a welcomed change.

We have more plans to add course descriptions/information to the tables given by adding a new "courses" content type and using views to display the tables for each "track" that a student can take in the program. I'm not really looking forward to that, but it will be awesome when it's complete.

The rest:
The rest of the site is pretty standard Drupal stuff. I'm using a job search (?) module to allow users to apply for jobs. A notification gets sent to HR that a resume has been submitted for which position. This feature is not yet up and running yet, but getting pretty close.

We have an Active Directory server that we're using to authenticate through LDAP. The LDAP Auth module came in really handy for that. I'm also using the LDAP Groups module to sync up LDAP Groups to Drupal Roles. It's a pretty slick system that allowed to use pre-existing ldap groups to assign roles. Now we just need to keep the LDAP Groups up to date so that no one "accidentally" gets rights to change something they shouldn't on the site. Now that the groups are working it makes my job a lot easier. I don't have to worry about any users in Drupal, just have to make sure that their groups in LDAP are in place... the module does the rest. :)

The New & Events page is just using a simple view to display a content type. I used contemplate the customize the way that the teasers were displayed.

That's all I can really think of. Does that give you the info that you want? Ask more questions if you'd like to know more.

Andrew (amariotti)