Posted by ghankstef on March 22, 2007 at 8:16pm
Hi folks. I'm trying to build an argument for using Drupal as a CMS at our University. I've found some examples over at the Drupal.org site. They tend to be deparment oriented. Do you have more examples that are for an entire Univeristy or at least a College, Law or Grad school? Department sites are ok but bigger sites are more convincing
Comments
Check the EDUCAUSE Wiki
http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/drupal
Castelldefels School of Technology
uses Drupal as a CMS for news and information:
Main site and english version
The school is located near Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) and belongs to the Technical University of Catalonia.
Drupal scares me ...
Well at my university they are forcing me to use Drupal to rebuild the entire website. In my professional opinion I don't think Drupal is very flexible when you start mixing in many departments. It may work for one department, but not for every department. So its really an argument of "can Drupal be a realistic end-to-end solution for a university with varying requirements?".
I will log my experiences with Drupal somewhere on in the Drupal Community. Stay tuned.
Take a deep breath . . .
It's too bad that you feel like you're being pushed into drupal at gunpoint. That's not a great way to get started with any project. What other sort of solution did you have in mind? Is there another product that you feel is more flexible -- open source or commerical?
I do think that Drupal can work for a whole university, but you're going to need to spend some time experimenting with the various tools and really thinking about how best to use them to meet your constituent's needs.
Personally, I'm using Drupal to build website for schools and school districts at the moment, so I've been spending a fair amount of time thinking about these sorts of things.
The three primary modules that are going to be most important to you are CCK, Views, and Organic groups. There are some minor modules (like date and calendar) that are associated with those, but these are the families of modules that are going to make the site work for you.
Experiment and get familiar with what you can do to create new content types that are organic groups. As a minor example, for a high school site I'm working on right now I have a couple of different group types. A "class" group has some fields that include specific views that are designed to display upcoming assignments in that class. But the activity group doesn't have assignments, so I don't include that view selector as a part of the view.
Years ago I was in your seat, working to develop a web site and CMS that would serve all (or mos) of Wichita State University's needs. This was long before drupal -- we were building our own CMS as we went along. I wish I'd had drupal at the time.
You're daunted by the variety of needs that the different departments may have. I think you'll be well served to spend a little time talking to some different departments and try to find out what those needs might be -- my guess is that you'll find they aren't all that different, in the end. Some may want one piece of functionality and not another, but you'll find that there's a consistent package of tools that they all want, and a handful of add-on tools that some will want and most won't need.
I really think that thinking about each department as an organic group -- with perhaps a handful of different group content types that handle some slightly different department profiles -- will meet most, if not all of your needs. If necessary, each group (therefore each department) can even have it's own theme (I wouldn't recommend it, but it's possible).
Hang in there -- there's a lot to learn, but I think if you really want to find the solution through drupal it's there waiting for you, and it'll save you time and effort in the long run.
Ditto!
Looking at each department as an OG will be a useful way to start -- another way to start solving the issues unique to your specific install is to start thinking about subgroups and/or needs that are common across departments. These subgroups/needs can be met with different content types that deliver different types of functionality. For example, you might want to have two types of groups: one for departments, the other for working groups. The departments can only be created by privileged users, where working groups (for communities of practice, or committees within/between depts) can be created by users in a different role
Drupal offers you a great deal of flexibility, and many ways of solving an issue -- at the beginning, this can feel overwhelming.
As jpj171 asks, what other alternatives were you looking at? What were the featuresets of these applications that made them a more effective choice?
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
What about each department as a taxonomy term?
I am converting our school's site to Drupal and I am leaning towards making each department a taxonomy term (Admissions, Alumni, etc ...). Then I am creating a menu block for each departments menu. In the block configuration, I have a php snippet that only shows the block if the current node has been labled with that taxonomy term. The menu block at this point is just hard-coded html links. I should probably use menu.module instead. Seems to work fairly well.
The big drawback is, this makes it hard for people in each department to edit their menu. This isn't a show stopper because these department menus change very infrequently
Thoughts on the merits of this approach? or a better approach?
OG and OG categories
With each department as an Organic Group, and using the OG Categories module (this module gives each group its own vocabularies) you get both -- Each department has its own space, and can control who can post into that space. OG categories also allows each department to edit its own taxonomy, and create a taxonomy-based navigational structure that is department-specific.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Interesting
OG seems to be more blog like though with most recent posting first. I really want something more hierarchical style - almost mimicking a static Website
Having grappled with similar
Having grappled with similar issues I have come to the conclusion that Drupal is NOT a "a realistic end-to-end solution for a university with varying requirements" if you're thinking of running everything off a single database. But that is only in as much as NO cms is or ever can provide such a solution. The minute you try to do something along those lines, you will have to start making compromises. I think a university should have a collection of Drupal sites (perhaps sharing some tables or using the same LDAP server) - and even many departments would do better with more than just one site - a specialized site for a specific project (OG simply doesn't have the same flexibility). The key is to make it easy for the sites to talk together. That's why I'm really excited by the various single-sign-on modules and even more by the http://drupal.org/project/provisionator module. Too bad the development seems to have halted on the Publish/Subscribe duo of modules (http://drupal.org/project/publish and http://drupal.org/project/subscribe.)
If your university expects a unified solution without some major development (from any CMS), it is going to be sorely disappointed. But not many other systems out there have the robustness, flexibility and dynamic development that supports Drupal. If more universities started using it and releasing their custom code in one way or another, we would be in even a stronger position.
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
Can you be more specific
Can you be more specific about the problems you had running a university site on a single database? Was it a problem with server/database load? I'm not sure how that will be any different from running multiple sites with multiple databases on the same server.
I would certainly agree that many departments will require more than one group -- I would expect that they each would need several subgroups -- it would make sense to have a subgroup for each committee in each department, and probably some for special projects and grants.
Since each group can have it's own template, you can create variations on the main university look and feel for each college -- and if you're a real masochist you can do the same for each department. There's a lot of potential there.
Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud, really. The main problem I can see with a model where you use multiple drupal sites (even using multisite) is that you're giving up the ability to have a built-in search tool that searches the entire university site. Users who are not familiar with your unviersity's site will come to the site and not realize that if they want to find out about admissions requirements for the school of fine arts, they will not find that information if they conduct the search on the main site, or using the search tool on the Liberal Arts web site. Going through the effort of making a single site work will make the site much easier for users to use, I think.
A possible setup would create a group for each college, each department, and any necessary committees within those colleges or departments.
Each college could have it's own template.
If you use the outline tool, you can build these into a hierarchical structure of pages that the user can navigate.
College 1
department 1
department 2
admissions committee
grad committee
Faculty Senate
College 2
department 3
department 4 . . .
and so on. You might need further group content types for Administrative offices, too (communications, admissions, registrar)
Each of those group types (college, department, committee) can have a distinct content type created for it, with it's own specific fields. Each can have it's own calendar, it's own content, etc. Since a department group page is already a part of a outline(book) it's very easy to add child pages for things like office information, admissions requirements, and faculty profile pages.
Then, a fourth group content type -- a "class" can be provided for teachers that will allow them to create groups for their classes, to which their students can subscribe, and where they can maintain a class calendar, post assignments, etc. That's not quite as fully-functional as Moodle or Blackboard, but for most faculty it's probably more online stuff than they want to do.
But if you go so far as to break out each college into it's own drupal installation (and who's going to maintain that code base? At least make it a multi-site installation, I hope) these colleges become islands of content that don't interact, and I don't think you're going to see a performance improvement in exchange.
That's where I'd start trying to tackle a single university web site.
-j
What I had in mind was a
What I had in mind was a single code-base installation on a single database - but with multiple prefixed tables - e.g. dpt1_cache, dpt2_cache sharing some tables (e.g. users). The advantage of that is that for instance CCK set ups could be customized for the needs of each department. Also things like biblio and filebrowser have very specific needs. It wasn't a question of load-balancing (that has to be done on the server-side) but of having to force entire schools to follow the lowest common denominator. This is particularly true of one off projects like conferences or specialized units like labs or research groups that may want to use external collaborators. Organic Groups aren't quite there yet to provide a complete sub-site functionality for something like a conference. Also it is not that easy to ensure that each unit at the university can still maintain their independent look and feel (this may depend on local politics). Groups permissions and privacy is another nightmare.
Now, I'm saying all this with respect to what is possible out of the box. Presumably a university would spend good money on proper development - so I'm sure with proper coding resources my issues could be overcome. Part of the problem is that a university needs its website to be a corporate brochure on one end and a community website on the other. The administration has one set of needs and the faculty and student another. This is difficult to reconcile without a lot of serious development work.
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
One more comment on
One more comment on searching. While having a cross-site search using Drupal is not a bad incentive, a Google search across the entire institution is a more than adequate alternative with the added advantage of indexing any static legacy sites, as well.
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
And one more`
This Lullabot post http://www.lullabot.com/work/sony_bmg_multisite sounds very interesting. Basically, they're describing something very similar to what I had in mind for a university which is basically an umbrella for a lot of independent 'bands' with some overlapping admin structures and the occasional shared 'fan'.
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
Group Content Types
When you say group content types, is this language that refers to a particular module you are using for taxonomy? I am new to Drupal and I do not see anything in the core that uses the language "groups". I am very interested in setting up a site for higher education that follows the logic you described. I am still trying to figure out how drupal will allow me to categorize content and then assign user permissions for content types. Can you elaborate on what is needed in terms of additional modules in order to accomplish what you are advocating?
Thank you.
Groups refers to the module
Groups refers to the module Organic Groups. groups.drupal.org is an Organic Groups site. Notice you can post different types of content: Poll, event, job, discussion ...
One major university using
One major university using Drupal across the board is University of Calgary - http://www.ucalgary.ca.
I myself am building a website called a virtual research environment at my school on http://research.edu.uea.ac.uk. I've noticed that many organizations use Drupal only for the 'community' portion of their web presence (Sony, the German Men's Health, MTV UK) but I wish my university had chosen Drupal instead of the current CMS.
Dominik Lukes
http://dominiklukes.net
@techczech
My Advice is to go with
My Advice is to go with Liferay. Drupal is meant for a more Department level. If you want to use a CMS on an enterprise level something like Liferay is WAY better. Drupal is a great project but it isn't built for the enterprise like the Liferay CMS is.
Enterprise CMS
@schup21: I don't necessarily agree with you that Drupal "it isn't built for the enterprise". My employer - Oregon State University - seems to be doing quite well with Drupal as the university-wide enterprise CMS, as do quite a few other large universities around the world.
Will Drupal work as an enterprise CMS "out of the box"? Of course not. It will take careful configuration just like any other CMS, proprietary or FOSS, to be an effective and efficient enterprise CMS. You're not going to take WebSphere or RedDot, slap a CD in the server, and launch a new enterprise site. It's unfair to expect that of Drupal.
What do you use to handle
What do you use to handle mutli sites (not subdomains, but sub directories)?
Seperating sub-directories Editors
If you are trying to keep one group of people out of another groups pages you can use Menu Node Edit, which allows you to create Sections and assign editors to specific sections only.
We'll be using LDAP to
We'll be using LDAP to control logins. All of our Departments and Offices of the college have their own web site, they maintain the content, create pages upload files and images etc. I'm not sure the best way to handle that.
OG + Path
We are making each university entity an Organic Group. They each get their own menu and content types. We are using Path and pathauto to create a sub-directory for each OG. For example, the Admissions office is OG admissions, and the path for all content they create is domain.edu/admissions/whatever-they-name-the-content. We have not launched yet, but so far so good.
Thanks for the info? Have
Thanks for the info? Have you ran into any problems using OG that way yet? Do all sub sites share a db!?
Portland State U uses Drupal multisite at enterprise level
In Feb. 2009, Portland State sites migrated 58 sites from a Binary Cloud platform into an enterprise Drupal multi-site install. We're now at 160+ sites. We run authentication through OpenID (but soon moving to CAS) to LDAP and organize sites under subdirectories rather than subdomains. I'm afraid I can't speak with any detail about the system architecture or db structure, but can put anyone interested in touch with folks who are familiar with these kinds of details.
Currently, except for one specialized site that serves up feeds of news, events, faqs, and profiles, we do not use CCK and Views, nor do we use taxonomies for the individual sites. We also do not use Organic Groups.
Our roles consist of content managers and site managers. Functionality-wise we're pretty slim, but we're working on new themes and templates that allow for more page layout options and for less-branded sites than the current one-size-fits-all theme provides. We don't support module development unless the functionality is made available to all sites, and we're working to develop in-house expertise in module devel and theming areas.
Penn State University
You should definitely follow btopro on Drupal.org. http://groups.drupal.org/user/15720
The work he has done at Penn State is spectacular.
This is an old posting of his which describes the project.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19119
This is a presentation he gave last December at our local users group.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/3173785
His system checks in daily with the official University registration so they can add and drop users from the appropriate courses. Faculty are able to generate a new instance of Drupal from a template or from another course. All sites share a single user database for login but have separate databases for each course.
ha thanks for the plug ;)
ha thanks for the plug ;) didn't know that was on ustream. tweeting now :)
https://elms.psu.edu is another good place for info about the system
Hope I can get back to pittsburgh after the asset management system is done (my new pet project to complement ELMS: https://elearning.psu.edu/elearning/elimedia-asset-management-server-update )
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Link to Wiki
This sees to be the best GDO wiki for groups http://groups.drupal.org/node/8136
I know there are many institutions that are missing from this however. Please add your university if you know it uses Drupal.
--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
Don't Forget Distros and Installation Profiles
You should also take a look at Open Scholar and Chapter3 has a new project that they are working on. http://www.chapterthree.com/open-academy