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.
About Us
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.
The Plan
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.
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.
We need help in best practices for our user community. More
explicitly:
- 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?
- 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?
- 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.
- URL domains are also an issue. We have some sites that are subdomains (mysite.udel.edu), other sites are directory-based sites under the hosted domain (udel.edu/mysite). 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 udel.edu/mysite. I don't want to rewrite the URL or redirect. Any thoughts or comments on this?
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 http://groups.drupal.org/taxonomy/term/4339. Sorry for the length of the message, please contact me if you have questions, comments, or suggestions.
Thanks!
-Tina