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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