[support] Drupal for University use

[Zohar Stolar]

I don't have experience with this very implementation, but just adding 
my 2 cents:
Consider presenting Drupal's multisite feature, which gives you the 
possibility to have multiple sites with one code base.
This is very useful in cases where you need many sites with similar 
configuration, but still you want minimal maintenance costs.

However similar, and sharing one set of modules, you can still initiate 
the sites with completely different configuration, using Drupal's 
installation profiles.
This way you can create new sites, destined for various tasks, as you 
mentioned: Departmental, personal, ad-hoc research teams etc.


Performance is obviously an issue, and will always be, but I found that 
using Drupal's internal caching system, together with server side 
optimization, and good hardware, can render any Drupal site fast enough.

I think you can find some more accurate statistics and benchmarking in 
Dries blog.


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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>