Posted by coderintherye on April 27, 2010 at 12:25am
We currently have legacy file system where students get a shell and a space on a server with a public_html folder where they can then hand put .html pages. I've been pushing for instead giving students web pages via Drupal. Possible methods are each student could get a sub group in an organic group, or each student could just get their own blog, or even each student gets a locked down Drupal site with only certain privileges (as part of a multi-site) install.
I know that Texas A&M does the last one for student orgs.
So anyone doing anything at all similar? Thanks.
Comments
Stanford doesn't, at least not yet.
We have a similar setup to yours for students at Stanford right now. We provide them with a public HTML directory, plus the ability to run CGI scripts through suexec, for security. We limit access to the shared MySQL service to groups though, so students and other individuals are limited in what apps they can run.
We are currently researching / discussing whether there is enough demand and resources for allowing individuals access to the shared MySQL service, or ways of letting individuals create a web presence through some kind of application (Drupal is a front runner, so is Wordpress MU). We are also considering whether allowing individuals the ability to publish some kind of rich profiles that can be consumed by other applications might be enough (many of the pages individuals create are resume-type sites, publishing research papers).
Considering the use cases,
Considering the use cases, this was posted in another thread, and may potentially be a model to consider: http://scholar.harvard.edu/
We have similar use cases and definitely don't think we want to get into the business of providing anyone access to MySQL instances. Providing a locked down application would be a happy medium, although I'd imagine we'd have to provide an automated tool leveraging the HTML import modules in order to satisfy those who would balk at the idea of having to convert current static .html pages.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
We're going through a similar
We're going through a similar process here, and have arrived at the same two solutions. We're in a bit of a deadlock right now trying to decide between the two. There's a group of Drupal people that want Drupal and a group of WP that want WP.
One line of thinking in the group is that WP as the more conservative route, and Drupal as the more extensible route. I'm also trying to make the case that Drupal may get more buy-in from Schools and Colleges, since many are already using it.
I'm wondering how your team is moving the conversation forward? What sort of arguments are helping people distinguish the tools? How is the decision making process generally handled (e.g., campus committee? central IT? ...?)
Just curious to hear how other universities are tackling this issue.
Hey Doug, In our case, this
Hey Doug,
In our case, this is the beginning of one process and the end of another. The process that is ending is getting people off of an ancient AFS (Andrew File System) server. The process that is beginning is thinking of ways to provide web space without providing a full server shell.
With us, the hosting is by Central IT, and so the process is top-down, but it involves committees (yes plural) as well who have to sign off. I think in our case the decisions usually lean more towards easier maintenance/less cost for central IT to maintain, and that after that it meets the needs of the staff/faculty who desire to have pages. Usually, student input is not gathered, for better or worse (probably for worse, but ver few students use the space). Hope that was helpful.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
Create groups for each users
One solution that comes to my mind is to create organic groups (http://drupal.org/project/og) for each user. Then you could allow users to add "Pages" to every group and thus allow them to add HTML pages. Filters will allow these users to add "Full HTML" pages. You could also take a look at http://www.blisstering.com/auto-create-group-module to create groups automatically for all users.
Cheers,
Mukesh Agarwal
www.innoraft.com
We create public webspace for each student org
We create an entry in a directory:
https://www.amherst.edu/campuslife/studentgroups
and public webspace for each student organization, along with a couple of groups used for access control, from institutional data. By default a student org gets a sort of directory listing:
https://www.amherst.edu/campuslife/studentgroups/bluestockings
which they can then flesh out as they see fit:
https://www.amherst.edu/campuslife/studentgroups/investing_club
Editing permission to the org websites is managed via the groups we populate for them. This runs inside a single drupal instance used for the entire campus. Student orgs get access to the full suite of tools we have available (things like image galleries, webforms, etc). The student org stuff has been running for 3 years now and has mixed participation - a little less than half of the orgs choose to edit their webspace in any given academic year, and of those that choose to do so I'd say only half of them continue with their use.
The plan is to fold in alumni participation as well so that orgs never 'die,' their maintenance just passes to the alums who were members when they were students.
The same mechanism is basically extended to individual user homepages - we've replaced ~ directories with public webspace on the same Drupal instance, so for example:
https://www.amherst.edu/users/H/dhamilton
is my public webspace. Student participation is MUCH lower on these pages, at a guess less than 10%, though many have discovered that it's a convenient place to tuck binary content they intend to use elsewhere.
Thanks this is good info, we
Thanks this is good info, we also had ~ directories, and I'm pretty sure the participation rate is also quite low on the student personal page side, so it would be beneficial and prudent I think to move to Drupal installs instead.
For your student org thing, looks like you guys are doing something quite similar to what Texas A&M did where they basically provide a turn-key install profile. I'd definitely like to try to see how much work it would take to produce something similar.
With groups, do you mean they are in Organic groups, or groups in LDAP, or just roles?
By the way, like your theme.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
groups
Thanks for the kind words on the theme, I passed a link along to our designer.
Sorry - when I mentioned groups I was referring to a module we developed to handle access control and hierarchy among other things, which uses the concept of groups for access control. I wrote a case study of it a couple of years ago which is a little out of date but still largely accurate - that's over here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10231
These are not drupal roles, or organic groups, they're our own invention.
That's an interesting
That's an interesting implementation. I'm going to pass it along to the decision makers to see if they want to implement something similar. Thanks.
Drupal evangelist.
www.CoderintheRye.com
wordpress and Drupal
We have a situation with a 4 college district, two are incorporating WordPress into an existing site, and two who are completely renovating and moving to Drupal
Our college chose Drupal because we didn't see a clear way to move forward with WordPress, in terms of infrastructure.
It will be interesting to see how this develops, especially since our district has not decided what to do with their own website.