Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By saml on
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Overview
UPPNEX is a new initiative at Uppsala University, (lead by it's High Performance computing center SNIC-UPPMAX), to provide storage and high performance data analysis resources to the vibrant Next Generation Sequencing community in the Stockholm/Uppsala region and Sweden as a whole (some of the many recent projects was recently published in Nature).
This initiative is thought as a resource for wet-lab researchers with limited computer experience, and so it was important to provide with a one-stop place were these users can go to find documentation, information and contact to support staff. A website needed to be built.
Jonas Hagberg, system expert at UPPMAX and lead of the UPPNEX project, built up the site, created the current theme as a modification from the sky theme, and created the overall structure. Frustrated with the Plone CMS for the UPPMAX website, the choice of Drupal was natural. I came in at the later stage of the project to create some graphics, the logo (in close collaboration with Jonas) and some additional configuration.
Implementation
The site has benefited greatly from the CCK/Views combo, with special content types for things such as application experts, Installed software etc.
On the application expert page, we are also using ImageCache to support automatic cropping/scaling of images. One thing I discovered here for the first time was the very useful action "Scale and Crop". This solves the problem that it can be very hard (if possible at all) to manually create a sequence of actions of scaling and cropping which works with all possible combinations of "too long" and "too wide" images. "Scale and crop" does it automagical ... Nice!
For administration, we mainly depend on the DHTML-menu module, which makes the rather deep adminstration menu expandable without reloading the page. Neat!
Remaining struggles
One thing we still haven't solved in the way we wanted, is PDF printout. We use the print module, which also supports PDF creation, via 3 alternative libraries, and unfortunately none of them seem to be the silver bullet we were looking for. We are using TCPDF now, to minimize dependencies and server resource usage, but it doesn't seem overly easy to modify it's output style. There are some settings for fonts etc. but we would need to add custom CSS in order to make some images flow correctly with the text et.c. ... but hopefully TCPDF will mature as time goes.
