Well, as inspiration for anyone else considering doing a drupal installation for an education site, we recently launched two websites which were converted from normal boring old html pages to drupal sites.
http://www.math.ohio-state.edu
http://www.mslc.ohio-state.edu
The math site was a challenge and probably took over a year including planning and evaluating various content management systems. We knew we needed a CMS as we have groups of people who need to edit pages but aren't very technically inclined. After trying about every CMS under the sun, I settled on drupal for several key features:
1) front end editing. I believe it's much easier to explain to casual users.
2) extensible. Out of everything I looked at, drupal had the most logical and flexible system for extending and building web based applications.
3) available modules. Drupal has an excellent selection of stable modules.
The mathematics website uses some stock modules and numerous in house modules. The course pages, course offerings and people pages are all done with custom modules. The course offerings page is manged by a staff member who keeps it up to date and allows instructors to edit the pages as they need. The module for the people pages integrates with our departmental ldap database to work as an online phonebook. The drupal installation is modified slightly to support SSL logins and to return a basic table based theme for older browsers.
The MSLC site uses only one custom module, to handle the course pages. The content on the course pages is generated almost entirely by the views module however, our custom module basically just aggregates views and displays them based on the course taxonomy term. Everything else is pretty stock. It uses the event module, flexinode and disknode to handle workshops and file downloads. I think this has been an excellent solution as the administrators now have greatly simplified site management. If they need to add a review lesson that applies to 3 courses, they just create a new file node and tag it with the taxonomy terms for the courses and everything else happens automatically.
Overall, though we've had a few issues, drupal has been an excellent solution and gives us a lot of flexibility to implement more web based functionality in the future.
Comments
LDAP Phonebook
Very nice. I found your posting whilst searching on "LDAP phonebook". I was looking for a "Drupal-official" phonebook/directory module just like what you have done. Any chance you would be able to make this into a contributed module? It would seem like something that a bazillion people could use.
Jim
Problem in large user environment?
Great! good to hear that, but did you experience performance problem when using in a large user environment? I experienced slow when I have a few news aggregator sources. It just runs slow they update them and more users accessing them.
Elvis Lam
Internet Marketing Watcher
Neat tables! ;)
Hi there!
On the page which lists all the courses (math), you have quite a neat table! Now I need to build neat tables quite often as well in my projects, but until now it was a mystery for me whether Drupal is a convenient tool to implement such task.
So please, reveal the truth: how hard was it to program those tables? :) And I mean just output, without even CMS-side of it. Was it more cumbersome, than "from scratch" method ? Is there a flexibility of altering the "tab split" feature on the CMS side (eg change "undergrad/grad" tabs to say "day/night" or etc) ?
Regards.