OpenEDU: Powered by Acquia Lightning

Built with the needs of higher education in mind


OpenEDU: Powered by Acquia Lightning is distribution directed at providing higher education a great framework to meet the most common technical and UX needs while being fully extensible to build up to more complex technical requirements.

OpenEDU is developed and maintained by ImageX and 1xINTERNET

A Strong Core:

OpenEDU is a sub-profile of the popular Acquia distribution Lightning which means you inherit the powerful editorial and workflow experience as well as the robust Media API. Acquia has developed hundreds of automated tests allowing developers to be confident in the core profile.

OpenEDU Components:

For a full listing, view our Documentation

The following features that will be enabled upon install as of current release are:

• Core – This provides the core functions, and nuts and bolts of the installation.
• Course – This provides a course content type.
• Department – This provides a department content type.
• Grid Block – This provides a custom block type that allows content to be served in a grid format.
• Hero – This provides a custom block type to deliver Hero Banners.
• Media and Text – This bundle provides a “ping pong” style layout used in some default content and can be reused if needed.
• News – Provides a news content type, page and view.
• Profile – Provides a profile content type, page and directory view.
• Program – Provides a program content type and default page.
• Search – Provides a default Search API setup that is used with featured views.
• Story – Provides a story content type, view and default page.

How does ImageX make money from OpenEDU?

In large part, we don't. Most organizations that find and download OpenEDU from Drupal.org have the technical competency to download, install and customize the distro for their specific needs. OpenEDU represents our attempt to contribute to the Drupal community and drive more adoption to Drupal as a CMS, as well as reduce barrier to entry for those organizations not yet on Drupal 8.

Some potential users of OpenEDU will either not have the technical staff or capacity to customize OpenEDU and/or Drupal and may look for an agency parter like ImageX to assist them with their project.

Installation:

OpenEDU is a composer-based project. As such, you will need to first install composer (https://getcomposer.org/download/) to install OpenEDU.

Once installed, run the following command:
composer create-project imagex/openedu-project MY_PROJECT

Composer will create a new directory called MY_PROJECT containing a docroot directory with a full OpenEDU code base.

You can then install it using either:

• Web Browser: Navigate to your site’s URL and install as you would any normal Drupal installation by following the prompts.
• Drush: Using the drush si command.

  for example:
 drush si openedu —site-name='My EDU Site' --db-url='mysql://dbuser:dbpass@127.0.0.1/dbname'

PHP Performance

The sample content contained in the OpenEDU distribution (and enabled by default) is quite large, you may need to raise your PHP memory_limit setting to >= 192MB and potentially your max_execution_time to >= 60. Once installed, you are safe to restore these to their initial values.