By coreyp_1 on

Hello, All! I just wanted to announce my newest site: TheFreeCollege.com.

For the last few years, several Colleges and Universities have been making their courses available online for free. Unfortunately, they are hard to find! The closest that anyone has come to compiling these in a single location has been iTunesU, but even that is difficult to navigate, search, and wade through to find the good stuff. This is my attempt to change all of that.

TheFreeCollege.com is a simple site where users can "Bookmark" courses that they want to follow, and within those courses, they can mark off the Sessions that they have watched. Of course, you can also rate the courses and leave comments.

What surprised me about the building of this site was how little customization I needed to do. Thankfully, because of my history with Drupal, customizations were generally painless. Custom code was used to find and import Courses and Course Sessions (to the tune of 50,000+!), but because there is no standardization as to how these listings appear in the wild, each one has to be processed by hand to ensure editorial consistency. Most of the listings have to be thrown out because they are not actually Courses but lecture series, podcasts, etc. At the moment, I've only made it through approx. 40% of my original scraping script's nodes.

For theming, I started with the mpFree contrib theme, but am using a subtheme in order to add some of my own CSS.

The only other custom code that I used was for the embedded media field so that the Custom URL component could recognize more file types.

Views, Views Attach and Flags are the glue that make most of the site work, while Rules and VBO make the editorial process slightly less painful. Of course there are other modules, too, like Fivestar, VotingAPI, Google AdSense and Analytics.

I just hope I don't kill my shared host account...

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jdwalling’s picture

jdwalling commented

Since you are concerned about over taxing your shared host account, what have you done to optimize performance and what are you considering? Does Boost fit into your plans?

opdavies’s picture

opdavies
He/him
Primary language English
Location Wales
commented

It's a good-looking website!

pkej’s picture

pkej commented

A handsome site, and very handy. Unfortunately some of the courses didn't play in my browser, Chrome 5, OSX. It might have just been me being impatient.

Try out Pressflow-version of Drupal. It has optimized SQL and dumps compatibility with PHP 4.x. Much better speed out of the box.

And the tip about using boost is great. In addition I suggest using some kind of optimization of the icons for example:

http://drupal.org/project/css_emimage

Or CSS sprites:

http://drupal.org/project/imageset

Some kind of CDN, for example a fake CDN:

http://drupal.org/project/parallel

There also is a module for gzipping the CSS:

http://drupal.org/project/css_gzip

or atleast tidy it:

http://drupal.org/project/csstidy

Since your site is mostly anonymous browsing, the above modules will probably give you a lot of mileage.

Paul K Egell-Johnsen

sovarn’s picture

sovarn commented

Look awesome and thanks for the optimisation tips :)

pkej’s picture

pkej commented

I just started watching a course. And when the video gets to the end, there is no next and prev links linking the different parts of a course together.

You should look into adding that kind of navigation for the course pages. Another future enhancement would be to create a playlist out of a whole course, the the user wouldn't have to do anything. Mediafront is a good module to look into for this kind of functionality.

And finally:

You should link to the original source home page for every video. It is just common courtesy to give credit. As for wrapping everything within your site you might be on thin legal ground; I'd recommend legal advice upon that; and especially since the content you are aggregating are from separate locales.

OTOH, there might be an exception for tax payer funded content; but I think there is an exception when it comes to colleges and universities. You should get proper legal advice, regardless.

Best regards,

Paul K Egell-Johnsen

BeaPower’s picture

BeaPower commented

Nice site, how did you get the grids to show the titles and courses all next to the images? Did you use Views?

EitanYa’s picture

EitanYa commented

I use it with some of my sites. Is it mpfree?

There are still many collapsable regions you might want to use for views.