Unique Situation: Creating multiple websites w/ one template

Posted by bremskraft on June 29, 2009 at 6:52pm

I work for a University, and am interested in a CMS that would allow me to create one "template" to use for multiple faculty websites. In other words, I would like to offer individual faculty members a template they can use for their individual website that would allow them populate their website with content through a WYSIWYG interface - they would not need to know HTML, etc. If we were to go with Drupal, would each faculty member need to download an instance of Drupal? Is there a creative way to get around that?

Comments

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Posted by WorldFallz on June 29, 2009 at 7:05pm

There's no need for your users to install and maintain their own instances of drupal. In fact, there are several way to enable this kind of segmentation. Depending on the details of the site, you could do it by username, tags, subdomains, etc. We would need more details about what you would like to do in order to provide more specific advice, but it's easily doable.

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Thanks WorldFallz, I guess

Posted by bremskraft on June 29, 2009 at 9:30pm

Thanks WorldFallz,
I guess the easiest way to think about it is I need to provide the faculty a website where all they need to do is log in and input text to create their own "website." The template would be boilerplate, and the faculty would upload a photo of themselves, and change the text to customize their page (by inputting contact information, class shedules, etc). I will search the drupal site for more information on 'subdomains'.

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Posted by WorldFallz on June 29, 2009 at 11:51pm

But what do you want that 'website' to include? A single page? Multiple pages? A blog? Would users need to 'subscribe' to each site? Is all content public? Do you want urls like "teacher1.site.com" or "site.com/teacher1"?

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Thanks for your continued

Posted by bremskraft on June 30, 2009 at 12:30am

Thanks for your continued support WF. I would like to offer each faculty member a "website" that has multiple pages and would mostly include text and hopefully a way to upload a .pdf or .docx (though offering a blog or similar features may be nice as well). There would be roughly 6-20 pages per website. The menu for each site would include the following pages:

Home
Vita & Publications
Honors & Awards (optional)
Courses & Syllabi
Office Hours
Contact Information

Within the "Courses and Syllabi" page, I would like to offer faculty a simple way to set up a course website - which may add another layer of complexity. A course website may have any of the following:

Home
Course Information (optional)
Syllabus
Lectures (optional)
Lecture Notes (optional)
Web Resources (optional)
Handouts (optional)
Readings (optional)
Assignments (optional)

We have several hundred faculty members. Most faculty do not know HTML, or are not terribly proficient with it. One of the better faculty websites is: http://faculty.unlv.edu/gbrown/
I would like to offer other faculty a way to easily put up a website with that kind of content, and architecture.

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Posted by WorldFallz on June 30, 2009 at 2:01pm

Yep, you can use drupal for this no problem. I would probably use taxonomy to setup the individual "websites".

Some modules/ideas to get you going:

http://drupal.org/project/cck - to setup the various different types of pages
http://drupal.org/project/views - create listings of nodes
http://drupal.org/project/author_taxonomy - setup the taxonomy 'websites' based on authors
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto - automatically create page URLS of the form site.com/author/home etc)
http://drupal.org/project/themekey - change the theme based on the author (if desired)
http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_menu - maybe use it to present the authors pages as a menu
http://drupal.org/project/image or http://drupal.org/project/imagefield - add images to pages
http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor or http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg (possibly using the NicEdit option) - for easy content entry for non-technical users. Fckeditor is my current preference, but if you don't need all the features and options (like http://drupal.org/project/imagebrowser integration) it's probably overkill. The NicEdit option of wysiwyg is a great little basic editor-- checkout the demo to get a better idea.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but that's all I can think of at the moment.

The only other thing I would consider is perhaps ditching all that and using the http://drupal.org/project/og module -- this would probably be better for offering the course option. It allows you to set up groups of users and content (much like a course). Of course you could always combine both approaches-- use the above for the faculty sites, then add og for the courses and make each faculty member the group administrator of their course groups.

I know it's a lot to digest but drupal's power and flexibility are unmatched so there are frequently many paths to the same destination (and that's part of what makes it complex).

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Sir: How can I create

Posted by jessmagz on June 30, 2009 at 1:16am

Sir:

How can I create something that you described as "siteuser.mysite.com" instead of "mysite.com/siteuser"? Is this something handled by Drupal or something that is done by configuring my webserver? Please advise. Thanks a lot.

Math Resource Center

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Posted by WorldFallz on June 30, 2009 at 2:03pm

1) not every geek is male ;-)

2) it's not polite to hijack someone else's thread

3) the answer to your question is http://drupal.org/project/subdomain

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