In the interest of sharing what we're up to

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
xjm's picture

Today at the pre-camp meetup we talked about keeping in touch regarding our current projects in our individual departments... so, for anyone interested, here's what I'm up to at the Department of Family Medicine:

  1. Migrating from a Drupal 5 multisite setup (with lots of abuse of Views 1's theming layer) to a single Drupal 6 site with Domain Access to control the separation of content (and maintainable use of Views 2).

    The whole process is made more complicated by the fact that we want to keep the node IDs the same for several content types on one site, and by the fact that this is living content (it will continue to change up to the minute we make the switch). I looked at a number of different import/export solutions for this, but all of them were too buggy, unreliable, and tied strictly to the browser interface, so I've just written a bunch of quick-and-dirty PHP scripts to do the heavy lifting, plus a shell script to execute these scripts and other tasks via drush.

  2. Improving the integration of our... unique... HR/personnel Oracle database, our rudimentary PHP Faculty & Staff Directory, and personal profiles in Drupal (Content Profile, Views of course, and an in-house custom module to interface with the aforementioned database). The custom module includes use of both the Batch API and the job queue module.

  3. Taxonomy Access Control: We rely heavily on TAC, but the Drupal 6 version had a number of critical bugs. I scratched my own itch and patched them.

    There are still a few outstanding issues and it's a complicated module to administer... if by any chance you use TAC in D6 and have problems or questions, check out the improved docs and the issue queue.

So, what are you working on right now?

Comments

Over here in Learning

Grondhammar's picture

Over here in Learning Solutions, we have a kind-of "meta-project" --- push for hosting. If DoIT had a simple, inexpensive LAMP we could drive a lot of business their way. As it is, budgeting for the 1) red tape and 2) 5 to 10 times more expensive service is leaving pretty much everyone we talk to wondering what other options they have.

As far as building things, we're in a bit of a lull as far as exciting new modules. Lots of theming, lots of CCK, not much custom development.

I really like the idea of this thread, though, so I'll contribute more as we get further into development work.

Summer = Features, Contexts, Open Atrium

dmcw's picture

Great idea for a thread!

This summer we've been "featurizing" our Collaborative Sites platform. This has involved learning how the features and context modules work, and then breaking out the functionality of the course sites into modular features.

We set up our feature server to help us organize and version control our features. It is a very basic solution, but it is working pretty well for us for now. (In case you are interested, setting up a feature server is super easy: just turn on the featureserver feature from the devseed site. The singular theme can be handy for this, too.)

Other CS improvements include battling with MS Word copy and paste, DruTube (a Drupal based flash video experiment), getting rolling with drush, configuring user protect to prevent Ss and instructors from locking themselves out of our sites, and continuing to futz with NetID auth.

Along the way we've continued working with Open Atrium for student hourly management and project collaboration. We've created a few simple OA features that we'll be popping up on our feature server real soon now. These include a webform feature for student worker checklists, a movie reserve list feature, and an equipment catalog.