Drupal for Education

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watbe's picture
Posted by watbe on March 13, 2010 at 11:25am

Hi All,

I'm a high-school student who is working on a professional student social/educational networking site for Tauranga Boys' College as part of a NZQA scholarship. I am keen to get in touch with any experienced Drupalers in New Zealand (preferably in Tauranga if there are any), to discuss Drupal and education related stuff.

For those interested, read on:

The site will be hosted at TBC and the schedule aims for a beta testing period throughout staff, students and parents by term two (late-April). I'm have two years of experience working with Drupal, the site will be heavily customized, and beautifully designed both in the aesthetics and UI. It is a very exciting project and could pave the way for many similar school sites to be set up in New Zealand and perhaps around the world.

The term social networking is rather broad, but I am aiming to create an environment where students can post content and media, discuss school and non-school related topics. Its aim is to foster out-of-school participation with their peers. It's definitely not a new idea. I believe the biggest challenge lies in UI design, to create something that students, teachers, basically anyone with access to the site can easily use and browse. Getting students motivated to use the site will also be a challenge.

I plan to do a write-up for Drupal.org once the site is live and operating, it should prove interesting as it will be incorporated as part of TBC's online environment, so 1,800 boys will be accessing the site, plus their families, teachers and coaches, so feedback and analysis can be collected with ease.

I'm looking for people who are willing to help or provide tips on things like advanced theming (especially form design), module development and how to manage 1,800 users... !

You can find me on skype - waynetsai.nz most of the time, or contact me at wayne@exon.co.nz

Cheers,

Wayne Tsai

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Comments

Great stuff! You are taking

Posted by Bevan on March 13, 2010 at 6:25pm
Bevan's picture

Great stuff! You are taking on ambitious but exciting project. A few general tips;

  • Try to take the project on in very small chunks; launch in one week with a tiny set of features and grow it from there little bit by little bit. Release something every week at the same time on the same weekday e.g. every Wednesday night.
  • Utilize any Drupal developer contacts you have as much as possible, especially for questions like "Which module does blah blah?" and "How can I do blah blah?". Use this NZ group on GDO and also IRC (#Drupal-NZ) for real-time answers. There are usually a few people in there and it is a lot more friendly than #Drupal or #Drupal-Support.
  • Have multiple staging environments available and be able to reset them (update them from live) for demos, trying out random modules, breaking the database etc.
  • Try to find an established drupal shop or developer to sponsor the project with time to help with mentoring, infrastructure, staging environments and process.
  • If you are going to write any code (including a custom theme) learn a source control system like git, which will be useful when Drupal eventually moves off of CVS.

Bevan/

Tauranga Drupal help

Posted by millionleaves on March 13, 2010 at 8:15pm
millionleaves's picture

Hi Wayne

Sounds like a great project. We're a Drupal shop based in First Avenue and would be happy to help out. Give me a call on 07 985 6222 and we can talk ....

David

Thanks

Posted by watbe on March 13, 2010 at 10:31pm
watbe's picture

Thanks for the tips Bevan. Interesting you suggested a tiered release schedule, I can see it helping in many ways so I'll give it a go.

I feared that it could be difficult to manage the code so I have started looking into a source control system, it's still quite new to me, thanks for the suggestion of git.

@David,

Thanks for the offer, I will get in touch sometime.