Portland State University College of the Arts

By OpenSourcery on 4 December 2013

The PSU College of the Arts approached OpenSourcery with a concept of a site to harmonize with a re-branding campaign. The College of the Arts and its four affiliated schools each had individual sites with different sub-brands and site goals. The new site merges the five sites into one, while maintaining individualized branding to differentiate the four schools from each other.

Opensourcery was chosen as the development and design firm to build the suite. The scope of work was roughly:

Redesign and re-architect the College of the Arts homepage.
Work within an existing (huge) multi-site install
Extend campus-wide base theme and branding to the new College of the Arts(CoTA) sub theme:
Apply existing CoTA offline branding to their new website
Merging multisite installation into one site, while maintaining separate menu and content architecture

Visit pdx.edu/the-arts →

Why Drupal was chosen:

PSU already has a large Drupal multi-site install (200+ sites) which are administered in-house
Site editors and administration are familiar with the back-end UI for administering content
PSU has a raft of in-house modules to assist users on the backed
- A module to add users to the site via their campus electronic account
- Another module to integrate with their on-campus SSO system.
- A set of common permissions & roles that track across sites in the system (One editor role that has more or less the same permissions.)
The Portland Drupal business community is large and very supportive of expansive IT projects like PSU

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

The goal was to create a uniform visual experience for the College that accords with new printed and video brand assets. Secondarily, we streamlined the ability for College stakeholders to easily add/edit/delete content. We had an existing enterprise multisite install to work within, and were charged with highlighting recent events, art pieces, and news in a variety of views. Finally each school had a portfolio of work to showcase.

Notable features:

News & Events (Recent & Upcoming) — by school and college
Portfolio — by school and college
Faculty profiles
Slideshow as entrypoint for navigation

The final project highlights development practices:

Development was accomplished jointly between OpenSourcery and PSU
Pushed boundaries of the existing enterprise site
Content staging was ongoing during final stages of development & theming
Steady use of CI and testing to ensure build quality and reduce regressions

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

PSU has a base installation profile, with base themes and a set of modules as part of it setup. Since we were already familiar with the majority of the modules in use by the PSU team, coordinating efforts was seamless. We used the PSU git repo as a submodule to our build repo. This allowed us to use our build tools, including CI, Behat, and drush make. It also made it possible to tag releases visible by the PSU team which could then be test integrated into their dev environment in preparation for launch.

The PSU base install uses context instead of panels, so we had to be a little creative about creating the subsections of the CoTA site that allows the site to operate as if it were five different sites from a content and menu perspective. We used Context entity field to switch contexts based off of a field on an entity, this allowed us to have one content type (news, for instance) and be able to post news nodes to different colleges in quick succession.

We also used a module to make the menu block module only show the relevant menu items for the given context. To make selecting items in the menu system easier, we used the chosen module to make the select drop down items searchable as well as more user friendly.

In the theming realm, we created a sub-theme based on a base PSU theme. The theme was created using SASS & CSS3. The theme was designed to dovetail with the outcoming print materials for the College of the Arts campaign.

Community contributions:

As with all of our projects, we use and review patches on issues relevant to the projects we work on. Furthermore, any fixes created in the course of development are sent back to the community in the form of patches. All this community goodwill is baked into our Drupal dev starter kit, Turnip. As part of our agreement with the folks at PSU, we included a set of trainings that included lengthy documentation on the individual components and the contrib modules that made up the site. Furthermore we've encouraged the team to help support the Portland user group by getting involved in our local meetups and inviting them to network and share their experience.

Organizations involved:

Team members: