California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)

The nation's first art institute to offer BFAs and MFAs in both the visual and performing arts, CalArts is dedicated to training and nurturing the next generation of professional artists, fostering brilliance and innovation within the broadest context possible. Emphasis is placed on new and experimental work and students are admitted solely on the basis of artistic ability. To encourage innovation and experimentation, CalArts' six schools--Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater--are all housed under one roof in a unique, five-story building with the equivalent of 11 acres of square footage in Valencia, California, just 30 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles.

INTRODUCTION:

After years of managing an ever-growing static-HTML website which included sub-sites for each of its six schools, CalArts was preparing to move their web presence to a Content Management System and looking for an Open Source solution to meet a series of functional and aesthetic requirements.

SITE REQUIREMENTS:

Given the size of content already comprising the old static site, CalArts needed a CMS which could offer innovative means of site navigation whilst allowing inter-relational multi-media content.

To better clarify the specific abilities of each CMS we considered for the solution, Design Guru and CalArts defined a general set of site requirements. In addition to simply storing content and allowing stake-holders to add to/edit it, the site needed to provide modular scalability and function as an application framework that could provide unique data-handling and grow depending on the changing needs of the Institute through time; without needing to undergo massive core upgrades to afford such changes.

Here are some major requirements of the new CMS solution:

User-accessible, hierarchical content :

Access to all published material on-site should be subject to a robust
permissions system,
Content/Comment publishing authority and viewing ability should be user-
specific, definable by user-groups.

Extensive calendar functionality :

The ability to restrict event attendance/viewing per user group,
Users will be able to post events to a common event listing, based on their site permissions,
The ability to relate multi-media to particular event listings (eg. Attach an image
or video clip),
Site-wide Forums & Commenting:
In order to increase multi-lateral communication, threaded commenting will be
available throughout the site.

News publishing :

Permissions-specific ability to submit/publish & view news postings,
News-to-front-page; high-level users (eg. Staff) will be able to assign news
postings to the Institute/School front-pages.
News, as well as other content on the site, can be un/subscribed to by users,
based on permission and content taxonomy,
News Syndication via RSS

Advanced Theming possibilities :

Aesthetically separate each school and other areas of the site whilst maintaining an overall site 'design,'
Each content item on the site should be style-able independently,
Dynamic navigation should be able to be presented in multiple areas of the site,
Content should be group-able (e.g. Faculty types per school; to display in vertical lists that can load individually but be presented alongside these lists.)

SOLUTION:

After considering relative merits of a number of CMS' the decision was made to develop the site in Drupal 5.x

Drupal natively afforded us the framework to build a site that was highly functional and customized yet not locked-down in core structure. When stacked up next to other CMS' which are built to allow simple content hierarchies (like Joomla), Drupal excels in providing the ability to ignore vertical hierarchy and organize multi-media content multi-laterally through taxonomy and associated access permissions.

Of course, at its core, Drupal's use of 'nodes' meant that we could relate anything on the site to each other - which proved to be an invaluable feature of the site when looking at styling and multi-admin content management issues.

Three key aspects of the build were crucial;

Aesthetic demands of the site required a combination of third party modules to allow styling patterns across content types, site areas and so on,
Hundreds of site users were to be administrators of various areas of the site and afforded permissions accordingly; they had to not be able to interfere with each other's content and all had to be able to work on the site with ease - the default permissions layer would need to be extended and a WYSIWYG editor installed with some image/file handling capability,
Custom content types would be necessary along with their dynamic display through lists.TECHNICAL:In order to meet the various site requirements and build aspects listed above, we made good use of the following Drupal modules.