Canton City Schools

The Canton City School District of Canton, OH has an enrollment of over 10,000 students, with two high schools, three middle schools, 14 elementary schools, and several alternative schools. Each school, and the district itself, have its own dedicated website. Until December of 2011, these were powered by a Drupal 4.6 multisite installation.

They contracted with V-Soft and Louisville Web Group to help them design sites that reflected their message better, transition them to a more modern version of Drupal to take advantage of advanced capabilities, and make it easier to manage.

Upgrade Path?

The first decision to make was whether we would do an upgrade. Running Drupal 4.6, that would involve at least 3 separate steps. 4.6 -> 4.7 -> 5 -> 6, not to mention all the contributed modules. However (and thankfully), another goal of the project was to clean up their content and get rid of the unnecessary chaff, making a better browsing experience. Considering this, keeping all their old content, users, modules, etc was actually a negative.

That answered the question for us. We simply went with a clean Drupal 6 install, and filled out the content skeleton for them based on their new sitemaps. This saved a considerable amount of time and money.

Design and Theming

Every site on the old 4.6 installation ran one of the Drupal default themes, with just different colors, so a large emphasis was on providing new themes. There were three main goals in this process:

1. Give the District website a unique look that helped communicate its message
2. Give each High School a unique look and brand that reflects their respective school colors and different emphases.
3. The other schools would not have unique designs and layouts, but it should be easy to change their color schemes.

In essence, this would be several mini projects wrapped into one. The district site, McKinley High School, and Timken High School, were each treated as almost completely separate projects.

We followed the following process for each of them, one at a time:

1. Determine sitemaps and content categorization
2. Wireframes to place the general elements
3. Design mockups
4. Begin Implementing theme and fill out site with the approved sitemap

During step four of the previous site, we began concurrently implementing step one for the next.

The themes for the elementary schools are all powered by one shared theme, but with a custom theme setting. They didn’t want to be able to choose any color they wanted, as it’s easy to choose crazy color combinations, so we went with color presets. In the theme settings, they choose the color preset, and it then loads that extra css file to change the header, footer and border colors throughout that site. It will also be easy to add additional color presets in the future.

Sharing of Information and Limiting Duplicate Content Entry

On the old sites, not much information was shared, and administrator for each site had to create events and new items. Having a consolidated calendar on the district site was a key goal. With the new site, this duplication of effort is now a thing of the past, thanks to the power of Feeds.

On the district site, when a content editor publishes a News Story content type, it will be picked up and transferred to all of the other sites and show up in their own News sections.

On the reverse side, whenever a school adds an Event to their calendar, the district site pulls it into its calendar. This is because with Views, we can easily add an iCal feed to each school calendar, which anyone can consume. And thanks to the built in features of the Calendar module, having each school have their own color stripe over their events was simple.

Results

The Canton City School District now has a web presence that better matches their forward thinking culture. Feedback has been positive from both internal staff and parents, and several local business leaders have complimented their new web initiative.