After the great work done via the D5 Drupal ED profile. I was keen to find out if others would be interested in creating a D6 (and/or D7) schools profile from scratch using the current best practice.
What I would be interested in working on is the idea of agreeing a best practice starting point for all schools and seeing how far you can take it before everyone wants to 'branch'.
For example we might all agree that:
Install fresh drupal 6
install Date and calendar
create roles
Governors
Teachers
Students
Parents
Hope fully everyone is still onboard
Then we see if we can take it a stage further do we handle Year groups/classes as taxonomy or organic groups?
If we could agree a concensus that takes us far enough along this route then we could create a Drupal 6/7 profile that schools could use as a useful starting point (that most of us agree on) but crucially if they then come up with great ideas such as classes/projects/newsletters that can be fed back into the profile
As it develops there will come a point when all our individual needs are too diverse to be served by a single profile but it would be an interesting exercise to see if that branching point is really drupal6/7 vanilla distribution! :-(
My background is graphic design/drupal website developer and Junior school governor so hoping to get a good website base for my school out of this but hope NOT to have to reinvent wheel
Comments
VoiceBox Minimal
This was one of the things we were thinking about when we built VoiceBox, and why we created a branching point in the install profile.
The writeup on it is here: http://drupal.org/node/923862 - about halfway down, I talk about the minimal vs the full install.
Using this as a base, we could then build out additional functionality using Features.
I'd love to see this happen, and realistically, we'll probably end up doing something like this because a lot of our work involves delivering precisely this kind of functionality.
DrupalEd served its purpose, but at the risk of stating the obvious I'd love to see a newer iteration that did not repeat the mistakes of the original package.
FunnyMonkey
As an exercise I thought I
As an exercise I thought I might try to recreate DrupalEd distro in D6 - what would you say WERE the lessons you learnt? (so I dont put them back in! :-)
it's not a drupalED
it's not a drupalED replacement but it is a newer edu branch that's forming -- https://elms.psu.edu/ just released an install profile yesterday you can jump off from.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Almost impossible to build true consensus
There are a lot of different education-based projects / initiatives / install profiles / features floating around at the moment. Monster Menus, VoiceBox, EduGlu, ELMS, OpenScholar, DrupalED are among the few I can think of off the top of my head. I've tried to build a consensus before around "let's only just terms like xyz" but the problem is that standards "for everyone" take an extremely long time to develop and get people to agree upon. Often times people end up breaking them anyway (like SCORM) or have their own flavors of the base package shortly after development. There are equally large numbers of modules supporting education at the moment with Organic groups, Gradebook, and Quiz being some of the biggies. I think it's more important to interpret information for others and give them research materials / hubs as jumping off points then to straight up tell them the solution (https://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/ for a small, outdated, example).
I do like you're idea but think the best solution is Features and open discussion in this group and cross posting with other g.d.o. . Features will start to make this conversation more automated but good old fashioned best practices seems like the best way to go. Look how many people own / use Bill's techniques from Drupal for Education and E-Learning. It's not standard but a lot of the calendar configurations are perceived that way. I'd snag copies of everything mentioned above that have versions, play with them, and then start to find the standards from there because these projects all help lower the cost of entry for others.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
Have downloaded and am
Have downloaded and am looking at Voicebox now - good job! Just a small thing I fell foul of "execution time exceeded 60 secs" so added "php_value max_execution_time 0" to your htaccess, could be worth adding to the distro?
I wonder if there is a concensus around identifying content based on class and subject (eg year6 french). For example you could use OG to create groups for classes and then you would only need to have a subjects taxonomy eg french, maths. Or perhaps you use taxonomy to have subjects appearing as child taxonomy eg
Year1
- French
- English
- Science
Year2
- French
- English
- Science
Year3
- French
- English
- Science
OR
French
-Year1
- Year2
- Year3
English
-Year1
- Year2
- Year3
Science
-Year1
- Year2
- Year3
It strikes me that greater minds than mine (and real schools) have looked at this simple stuff and that a distro that had this worked out would be a great starting point. As I said before the further we go on the journey the more the consensus would break down but If I was a head of a small school just wanting a leg up into drupal this would be a great start. It could even have some example pages because once they start adding events, lesson plans etc they will 'get it'
Regards
Joe
update
Creating a School website where classes are OG groups but 'subgroups' are created by cloning the og_ghp_ron view, adding a page view with additional Taxonomy argument thus
once you log onto the demo site
http://venturacottage.homedns.org/school01/user
webmaster
aa
http://venturacottage.homedns.org/school01/ogcourse/26 shows you all posts relating to Year2 eg Math, French, English etc
http://venturacottage.homedns.org/school01/ogcourse/26/english shows you the English courses and post (inc depth)
All works well except I cannot get the view http://venturacottage.homedns.org/school01/admin/build/views/edit/groups... to accept the arguments Year2/french only 26/french. It is a good start but just not very elegant.
If I can get this working well I hope to contribute it back to the community as a D6 Schools/education profile
I have a backup so feel free to alter the site (but let us know what you do/achieve)