The Pacific School of Religion (PSR) launched their new website in May 2008 on the Drupal platform. PSR is a progressive multi-denominational seminary located in Berkeley California and a member of the Graduate Theological Union. PSR's website is an essential tool in their communications with prospective students, alumni, donors, current students and their local community. ISL Consulting (Insight+Strategy+Logic) provided complete design, development and training services for the project.
Why Drupal?
We found Drupal to be the perfect platform for PSR. Content management was one of the most important requirements for the new site. Although their previous website was content managed they were eager to upgrade to a savvier CMS that would give them greater flexibility and more features in a central location.
User management, community management and community tools were the next big factors that led to Drupal. PSR had a variety of hosted community solutions, but wanted to integrate the various communities into a central online community to allow advanced functionality and communication between all members.
In addition to the immediate benefits provided by Drupal, it was clear that PSR would continue to expand their website features in the years to come. Drupal offered a solution to integrate functionality such as distance learning, collaborative work spaces, advanced community functionality and networking in the future.
After sharing all the benefits Drupal offered with PSR they were on board with using the platform, but wanted to see a live demo before committing. With a basic Drupal installation and a few core modules we were ready to perform a demo to an audience of twenty potential admin users. The Drupal demo was a success and they were immediately impressed with the level of functionality that Drupal provided. The demo also helped us better understand PSR's needs and those features that PSR most saw as providing a great alternative to their previous CMS.
Content Management
PSR has a very content rich website with several hundred legacy pages. Most of the primary site content was entered as Page content type, and more than twenty custom content types were created with CCK. The custom content types were mainly designed for items that would be added and updated regularly or content that would be sorted with taxonomies. Basic CCK input forms were created for News, Events, Press and Jobs to easily allow administrators to add new items to the appropriate sections of the site. A more advanced CCK input form was made for the PSR media library. The media library input form includes audio embed fields, video embed fields and full length text or transcript fields. By employing taxonomies all media content can be sorted into multiple media, topic and author categories from a single content entry form.
The Community Factor
PSR's previous site contained a secure student directory which allowed students and faculty to view basic student information, but students did not have the ability to update their own directory profile or actually communicate with fellow students through the website. Meanwhile PSR was also actively searching for a better solution for their online Alumni directory hosted through NetDirectories which offered only limited features and a poor user interface.
We helped PSR develop a community strategy that would allow users to not only create and manage their own user profile and directory listing, but also publish content such as activities, events and discussion topics in a private section of the site reserved for PSR community members. This puts PSR on the path to grow their community to include a lager audience in the future. Drupal made it easy to set up the various directories, roles, node profiles and permissions needed. By using Views and Access Control we were able to allow each directory listing to have it's own permissions while allowing other sections of the community to be available to all users. So far the PSR community includes students, faculty, employees and trustees. Soon Alumni will be integrated into this new community as well. Drupal offers endless possibilities for how this community can continue to expand. The most likely scenario will be to provide private community spaces for each role (student, alumni, employee, trustee) while also offering shared spaces available to all users.
PSR Centers
PSR supports several religious centers that each has their own web-presence maintained by the centers themselves. One of the goals of the project was to re-design three of the PSR center sites so each would have an update design that provided a cohesive look and feel with the main PSR site. Each of these sites would also need their own Drupal database as each center site would have unique administrators and requirements. We accomplished this task by sharing a single theme across all three sites. The theme references different graphics based on the sub-site directory configuration, thus allowing custom design elements in a single theme. In addition to a shared theme each site shares the same Drupal installation and module list. Each center site is configured with its own database to allow user management and content management to be segregated from the main PSR site. The Badè Museum of Biblical Archaeology and PANA are the first of the three center sites to migrate to Drupal and run on the PSR theme. CLGS is currently migrating to Drupal and is set to launch in the Fall.
Final Notes and the Future
This Drupal site profile has pointed out only a few of the many features that were developed for this site and were made possible by Drupal and the many contributed modules that we used to complete this project. The fact that Drupal is open source is very important in this regard, as it ensures that the platform will continue to be extensible and usable. PSR is our third completed Drupal project and we look forward to continuing to work with this awesome platform.
Below is a list of the various modules we used on the three websites: PSR, PANA and Badè.
Contributed Modules
- Content Access
- Administration Menu
- CCK
- Epublish
- Event
- Image Attach
- Image Gallery
- JS Calendar
- Lightbox2
- Simplenews
- Node Profile
- Usernode
- Node Family
- Auto Assign Role
- Google Analytics
- Date API
- IMCE
- TinyMCE
- Invisimail
- Menu Tree
- Pathauto
- Panels
- Restricted Search
- CAPTCHA
- Views
ISL Custom Modules
- Custom Admin Menu
- Custom Menu Dropdown
- Notify (Custom Modifications)
- Custom Breadcrumbs and Active Menu Items
