Announcing the Drupal Edu Initiative

Posted by jazzslider
Nov 18 2009

Welcome to the Drupal Edu Initiative, a new Drupal site designed to help you share your experiences, thoughts, and advice about using Drupal in higher education.

The Initiative was born out of discussions at DrupalCamp Austin regarding the uniqueness of the higher ed web content management situation. Colleges and universities often face unusual challenges in keeping their websites up-to-date, well-organized and easy to use; we here at the Drupal Edu Initiative believe that Drupal is a key component in solving those problems, and that's why we've launched this site.

At the moment, the site simply provides a link-sharing and blogging mechanism; anyone can register, log in and share a Drupal education-related link, or even post articles right here on the site. All of this user-contributed content is then voted on by our users, so that the most helpful content floats to the top of the home page where it's easy to find.

Please feel free to let us know if you have any suggestions for features or improvements you'd like to see; meanwhile, we look forward to seeing where this initiative takes us in years to come.

How we built our Drupal distribution

Posted by jazzslider | Filed under:
Mar 17 2010

Over the last couple of years the UNT community has been steadily migrating to Drupal; we recently selected Drupal as the official campus CMS, and are currently running several hundred Drupal sites in production.

The university Central Web Support office (where I work) is tasked with managing the Drupal instances we give to folks around campus, along with applying security updates, end-user documentation, and other general support services. We face a number of unique challenges in this capacity:

  1. How do we maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the enterprise?
  2. How do we ensure a reasonably simple user experience, especially when many of our users are non-technical folks saddled with web responsibilities on top of their usual jobs?

Takeaways from "Making Drupal Admin Simple"

Posted by jazzslider | Filed under:
Apr 21 2010

While I don't think we're alone in this, Drupal developers in higher education often face a very high need to create sites that are easy for non-technical users to administer. More often than not, college and university departmental websites are maintained by employees with other responsibilities and little web experience; how do we ensure that they can use (and love using) their content management platform?

Yesterday I went to a very helpful session at DrupalCon San Francisco geared towards this question: Making Drupal Admin Simple. Since so many of us need to do just that, I thought I'd share some of the helpful pointers they provided (and recommend that, once it's online, you watch the session recording).

  1. Use an administration menu. It doesn't really matter what you use, so long as your users have an easy, persistent, well-organized list of administrative tasks they can perform.

Edu at DrupalCon

Posted by jazzslider | Filed under:
Apr 19 2010

DrupalCon San Francisco is upon us. Here's a brief list of several sessions/BoFs/etc. that might be of interest to those of us in the education world:

Universities, Colleges and Schools with Websites Using Drupal

Submitted by jazzslider on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 09:44
Link: 
Universities, Colleges and Schools with Websites Using Drupal

Not sure how comprehensive this is, but it looks to be a very helpful list of educational institutions currently using Drupal. Also, it's a wiki page, so if your institution isn't listed, you can add it!

  • 1 point

How to set admin account username and email address in an install profile

Submitted by acrollet on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 13:17

This is a snippet from our current distribution's install profile. The password is set later with another helper function.

  1. /**
  2.  * Implementation of hook_form_alter().
  3.  *
  4.  * Allows the profile to alter the site-configuration form.

Drupal Information from Portland State University

Submitted by acrollet on Thu, 11/19/2009 - 10:27
Link: 
Drupal Information from Portland State University

Interesting info, including a list of many sites built on drupal.

  • 1 point

Drupal in Education group

Submitted by cws on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 14:37
Link: 
Drupal in Education group

The Drupal in Education group on groups.drupal.org has been active since 2006.

  • 1 point

Automating Drupal Deployment with Drush Make and Features

Submitted by jazzslider on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 13:07
Link: 
Automating Drupal Deployment with Drush Make and Features

This presentation was delivered by Adrian Rollett and I at DrupalCamp Austin 2009. It discusses the potential of the Drupal features module, installation profiles, and drush_make in building polished, custom Drupal distributions.

Tour Of Yale's Drupal Infrastructure

Posted by filler | Filed under:
May 12 2010

Yale ITS undertook a project in late 2009 to build up an enterprise infrastructure powering Drupal, the university's recently-selected institutional content management system. Nick Silkey recently presented at the first LOPSA Professional IT Community Conference, hosted by the local New Jersey LOPSA chapter, on how this was accomplished. From the program booklet:

"Content management systems are nothing new. What is new is the idea of a pressable, one-click infrastructure which can provision on-demand. This talk centers around the decision points and lessons learned from the infrastructure side of the house when a 30,000-person university standardizes upon an open-source content management system to host a rainbow of web content for various flavors of students, faculty, and staff. We shall discuss tools actively leveraged in the trenches which support automated builds and deployment, version-control systems, continuous integration workflow tools, along with high-availabilty infrastructure components.