Tina,<br><br>I'm just making a small comment here that certainly doesn't respond at all to the breadth of your question...<br><br>I think you guys might be a great case for using the Acquia distribution, and likely some of their other services. It would bring some stability and coherence to what could be an incredibly complex set of installations. <br>
<br>I don't mean to be glib or suggest this is an all-encompassing solution in any way, but it seems like just vetting modules on it's own could use up a bunch of your resources and the Acquia installation does that for you. <br>
<br>That's all I have time for now,<br><br>Good luck. It's awesome that UD is going Drupal!<br><br>Shai<br><a href="http://content2zero.com">Content2zero</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Tina Callahan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tinytina@udel.edu">tinytina@udel.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<p>I'm looking for any assistance,
suggestions or contact information that might help me direct the
implementation of Drupal as a University-wide web solution. Please read
below to see more details about what I'm looking for. Any information
would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p><u><b>About Us</b></u><br>
The University of Delaware (UD), located in Newark, Delaware, is now
committed to rolling out Drupal as the primary web solution for the
entire University. We currently have 7 colleges, 50 research centers,
23 intercollegiate athletic programs, numerous student organizations,
and a long list of units that currently manage their current static
html sites.</p>
<p><u><b>The Plan</b></u><br>
We plan to offer drupal-based web hosting to any and all units,
colleges, and organizations within the University community. Let's just
say that we expect to run drupal as a multiple "multi-site" installs
and are expecting 100+ sites. </p>
<p>At this point the plan is to run a production box with a mirrored
development box for site modifications. We are building the servers on
the UNIX environment using Drupal 6.</p>
<p>We need help in best practices for our user community. More
explicitly:<br>
</p>
<ul>
<li>We expect to set up a standard drupal install and add UD "vetted"
modules. As new modules or updates become available, we expect that we
will need to add these to the "core" set of modules that we will make
available to all sites. (ie. sites/all/modules folder) Any suggestions
on how to update modules and theme for a large number of sites?</li>
<li>To start with, we see three drupal core installs: the first for
low-profile or non-aggressive site development, the second for moderate
development, and the third for aggressive development. The thought
behind this is to reduce the number of sites that we need to review for
conflicts with newly added or modified modules. Any thoughts on this?</li>
<li>We are trying to develop a policy on user access to the file
system. We understand that there are users that won't want access, but
there will also be others that want to tweak modules and themeing
directories. Are there any suggestions on best practices for allowing
our users access to the files system? My systems folks do not want to
have the nightmare of granting access, but as a developer myself, I
think this is a must.</li>
<li>URL domains are also an issue. We have some sites that are
subdomains (<a href="http://mysite.udel.edu" target="_blank">mysite.udel.edu</a>), other sites are directory-based sites
under the hosted domain (<a href="http://udel.edu/mysite" target="_blank">udel.edu/mysite</a>). Udel.edu is running on
another server. I feel confident that we can run the subdomains without
much a problem, however, I am interested to see if there is a
suggestion on what to do with the latter issue of <a href="http://udel.edu/mysite" target="_blank">udel.edu/mysite</a>. I
don't want to rewrite the URL or redirect. Any thoughts or comments on
this?</li>
</ul>
<p>Please note, I recently joined the Drupal in Ed group and plan to
submit these questions more explicitly to them. I am also aware of the
case studies on <a href="http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/4339" title="http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/4339" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/4339</a>.
Sorry for the length of the message, please contact me if you have
questions, comments, or suggestions.</p>
<p>Thanks!<br>
-Tina<br>
</p>
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<pre cols="72"><span><pre>**********************************
Tina Callahan
014 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716
University of Delaware
302-831-1982
<font color="#888888"><a href="mailto:tina.callahan@udel.edu" target="_blank">tina.callahan@udel.edu</a>
**********************************</font></pre></span></pre>
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