I'm at the University of Southern Mississippi. I'm hoping for some feedback from the higher ed community on the following:
1) Caching. We were self-hosted until December 2015 and didn't employ caching. After moving to Acquia Cloud Enterprise, we have experienced a number of issues related to the balance of caching through Varnish and user expectations on how quickly content will be available to anonymous users.
We are currently on D6 with Organic Groups that cover the majority of campus. Anyone in a similar enterprise/institutional-level deployment who is hosting with Acquia and/or using Varnish? How do you set your caching time? Do you differentiate between content types or other variables, i.e., news articles are published more quickly? More questions if you are willing to talk offline.
2) Calendar. We are currently working on a D8 installation for the top level of our site and are looking for viable calendar options. We need a solution that will serve as a central calendar for the university and allow decentralized users to input, likely with a workflow for approval.
Any recommendations, including third-party software that may integrate with Drupal or provide JSON/XML that could be pulled into Drupal? We have looked at Active Calendar - https://activecalendar.com/.
Thanks,
Geoff
Comments
Acquia arggggg
Hi Geoff,
We too experience the same issues with Acquia caching and we are in the process of moving to Pantheon as they have a fantastic EDU program. My main issue with Acquia, is they move servers on a regular basis and don't update the symlink to the files folder which causes every image on the site to break for a day or two. My recommendation is to run away as fast as possible from Acquia!
We are also in the process of moving our main site to D8 and we need a super robust calendar. So, I'm also interested in solutions. We are considering Google Calendar since they also offer solutions for EDU.
http://phsc.edu/ (hosted on acquia)
http://info.phsc.edu/ (hosted on pantheon)
Sounds familiar
We are, unfortunately, only a little more than a year into a 3-year contract. We talked to Pantheon reps at DrupalCon and were impressed, but it's not viable at this point with the financial commitment.
We do have some folks using G-Cal for more internally focused events/dates, but hadn't considered it as the university solution. We will have to look into that and see if it can support a lot of the taxonomies that will need.
I like the responsive table for your course listings. Something we have been looking for that doesn't force you to have a horizontal scroll bar.
ERP Interface
We are a small community college serving Northeastern Arizona. Our governing board just awarded a contract to allow us to re-design and update our website from D6 to D8. We have no web developers on staff, so are dependent upon outside vendors.
I was really impressed with your class schedule and your note about pulling data automatically from your “ancient” mainframe system.
We’ve been trying to interface D6 to our Jenzabar ERP system without success. Would you be willing to share what system you are interfacing with?
Also, any potholes we need to watch out for in the D8 conversion?
ERP to Drupal
Hi Everett,
I noticed you and Cielo in the thread so I thought I'd jump in and comment. I'm Jay Epstein, the developer that built the PHSC Course Schedule in Drupal 7.
For any ERP to Drupal, it's really the same mechanics of what I did for PHSC, only difference really is the brand name of the ERP. Other than that, the magic is in the data architecture in Drupal, how performant views queries are and how well the system can scale up, but remain the "receiver" of mainframe data.
I'd be happy to chat with you to see if I could offer some assistance. As for Drupal 8, I think you'll run into quite a number of road blocks that would make Drupal 7 a far more attainable goal to meet, but, anything is possible!
Best Regards,
J
Email: jeppy64@gmail.com
Skype: jeppy64
Thank you for the compliments
Thank you for the compliments of our course schedule! To answer your question, our mainframe is Unisys ClearPath utilizing a homegrown student system which isn't much different than Jenzabar.
Our MIS department creates a batch file and outputs a csv file. We use feeds https://www.drupal.org/project/feeds to pull in the information and have mapped it to fields in our course content type. It gets a bit more complicated from there, as we have another feed which pulls from our HR department to an employee content type. In views, we created relationships between courses and teachers, so you can click on any teacher's name and see all the classes they teach.
We are getting very positive feedback from staff and students. Our course schedule and directory have been nominated for our state chancellor's award. =)
To answer your question of potholes with D8...well there are major issues with rules,pathauto, and token not being ready. This has put a big damper on us moving forward with D8. We have several projects that we are ready to move forward but are waiting these to be stable.
Please feel free to email me anytime at johnsoc@phsc.edu. Oh, I have to just put in a kudos for jeppy64...YOU ROCK!
FooTable FTW!
Thanks! I used FooTable for the responsive tables. https://www.drupal.org/project/footable. The coolest feature of our course schedule and directory is that we are using feeds to auto update every two hours. The information is being pulled directly from our ancient mainframe and hr systems! We used entity reference so there is 0 taxonomy on the site. In fact, I have taxonomy disabled =)
FooTable > FUBAR
Cool. I see there are some D8 releases. Thanks for sharing.
Calendar
We are testing fullcalendar (http://fullcalendar.io) right now. The exisiting module didn't work for us but we're just outputting a feed and pulling it in. So far it's been great, well documented, and full of features.
All the permissions and workflow will be in D7 and then fullcalendar will handle the output.
How are you generating your feelds?
Hi @robcook, We are currently using the FullCalendar module and we've hit a a few issues with it and were considering doing the same-thing ... i.e. switching to a custom feed with just the strait full calendar JS library.
How are you creating your feeds (i.e. custom, views data source, services, etc.)? And how are you handling pagination (i.e. loading a month or so of events at a time)?
Re:
Straight fullcalendar also lets you use the newest version which has improvements over the integrated one-we ran into lots of issues using the module. We currently have a fairly simple content type that we build custom JSON feed from. You could use views to output the JSON though. I want to say the calendar load 120 items at a time and loads more as needed with AJAX.
Another note that may be of interest is that we are using two taxonomies... One intended for users with 6-7 categories and then others for internal use so that departments can consume very customizable feeds for their own sites.
Hope that helps.