A quick browse through many public-facing websites at the University of Prince Edward Island reveals a growing trend: UPEI has been converting many of its existing websites to Drupal.
What you see is somewhat not Drupal, however, as a process was developed to serve sites made with Drupal as statically-served websites from a different server (build them on cms.upei.ca, serve them from upei.ca). This cuts down on the upei.ca server load (to almost nil), and shields the public from any slip-ups that may arise from the Drupal side of things. It's not that we don't trust Drupal or our own ability to keep the sites up, our Operations Manager is just paranoid (his own words).
Approximately 85 separate sites are currently installed (85 separate databases, one codebase), running Drupal 5.2 (upgrade to 5.3 coming next week). We toyed with the idea of having one big site on one big database with a couple shared tables, but elected to use many simple "vanilla" installations of Drupal, and to put our energy into finding ways to stitch them back together using the many tools at our disposal: RSS, standalone PHP scripts, BASH scripts, etc. This has been a huge lesson in scalability for us, as you can imagine. Our initial theme was based on Garland as you can probably tell.
Here is a small sampling of existing live sites built on the new UPEI CMS:
- top-level news site http://welcome.upei.ca/news
- Athletics main site and all team sites http://upei.ca/athletics
- Faculty of Science site and all department sites http://upei.ca/science
In-depth Report Attached
I worked as the lead Drupal developer for this project as a work term through the UPEI School of Business Administration. For the work term, I was required to complete a work term report of significant length. I wrote this report as a summary of our development of the UPEI CMS. Those who are working through their own scalability issues with Drupal, or are working with Drupal in an academic environment, may find this report useful.
I'd be happy to field any questions anybody may have about this implementation. Fire away!
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Palmer, Ryan - Work Term Report 2007.pdf | 125.08 KB |
Comments
Tools to be released?
The multisite cron/watchdog/variable tools ...
Do you plan to release those soon to the community?
Drupal development and consulting 2bits.com
Personal Baheyeldin
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Sure, I don't see why not,
Sure, I don't see why not, but I wouldn't consider them well-built or anything. They're more just basic php, basic bash scripts to tie things together. Half the battle was figuring where the data was in the database that we wanted to insert or update, and working with it. A lot of dumping and diffing.