[support] Drupal for University use

[Mark Shropshire]

John,

I work at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. While we do  
not have a central CMS, we use Drupal heavily in the Student Affairs  
division. We run Drupal for standard public web sites, employee  
portals/intranets and have started using it as a web app framework  
over the past year replacing legacy ASP apps.

A few things that have helped me a long the way:

1. Test and study contrib modules before installing in prod. Once you  
start using a module, you are supporting it and it is hard to take it  
away from end-users
2. Standardize on a theme. We use common custom themes on most  
departmental sites. The only thing we change is departmental branding.  
We occasionally change colors and styling for special events (ex:  
Homecoming Drupal site).
3. Setup and plan for good training for your Drupal content editors.  
My staff absolutely love Drupal and I think it is partly because we do  
training and have monthly Drupal user group meetings to discuss new  
ideas. Users training users.. it is great!
4. Take the time planning your hardware and software infrastructure.
5. Take a look at multisite as others have mentioned. We currently use  
it to quickly move sites between dev, test and prod. I am considering  
deploying a Drupal hosted service for our student organizations who  
need community sites and don't have web expertise or do not want to  
use free off-campus services. We would use multisite and a common set  
of themes and modules for this.
6. Make sure you have staff with expertise in apache/php/mysql  
administration, Drupal install/setup/upgrading (of course) and it will  
be great to have programmers who know or learn Drupal API so you can  
take full advantage of Drupal's power. You will probably need to have  
staff spend time scripting to make Drupal management easier. ex:  
setting up new sites, removing sites, moving sites to other servers,  
backups, etc.
7. Look into integrating the LDAP Integration module with your Drupal  
installs. It works great for us using eDirectory or AD. It is so nice  
having faculty, staff and students authenticate using their standard  
username and passwords. Of course, make sure to use an SSL cert. I use  
a bit of code in my settings.php file to automatically switch to https:// 
  when the login page is presented.
8. Drupal has pretty rapid development, especially compared to  
commercial solutions, so you have to stay on top of changes, patches,  
updates, etc.

Thanks!
Mark


On Jan 8, 2008, at 2:45 PM, John Callahan wrote:

> The University I work for is looking at various CMS solutions for
> several web needs, such as their primary websites, for
> colleges/department/research centers, for social networks, for student
> organizations, maybe even for individual student web sites.  The  
> idea is
> for the central IT group to host our primary sites and sites for  
> smaller
> groups without IT experience... and to support others on campus who  
> want
> to run their own servers/sites/databases.   I have put together a few
> smaller Drupal 5 sites and have enjoyed my experience so far.  So, I
> making a presentation to our Web CMS committee this Friday.   (I  
> believe
> they're also looking at Joomla, Plone, and a few commercial options;  
> and
> we are testing Sakai for course management.)
>
>
> I'm putting together the basics (basic architecture and IT  
> requirements,
> pros and cons of Drupal, list of major Drupal web sites particularly
> academic sites) but I'd like to know if anyone else has done the same.
> What kind of feedback did you get?   Are there are pertinent points  
> not
> obvious to the beginning Drupal user (such as myself) that may be  
> worth
> mentioning?
>
>
> Scalability is also an issue.  I don't know the traffic statistics but
> there will be a wide range of applications and volume; from our basic
> informational pages to social networks run by faculty/staff to small
> research groups.   I've read on a few sites that Drupal does not scale
> well to high traffic sites, such as 15M+ hits/month or so.  However,
> those references are a bit out-dated and I know The Onion, MTV UK, and
> others receive much higher traffic than we would.
>
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.  Thanks!
>
> - John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
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