Transforming Yalesites: The Inside and Out of Yale University's Drupal Service

Yale University has recently transformed the YaleSites service by upgrading the platform from Drupal 6 to 7 and providing additional features to make building a site on the University campus easier. While our first implementation of YaleSites was an incredible stretch for the University (it was the first widely available, centrally-supported CMS offering), most of the focus was on adoption and cost savings. We provided some features we thought the user community wanted – Image Galleries, Blogging, Calendar – but quickly realized there were other major issues that needed to be addressed to make it easier for non-technical faculty, students, and staff to build their websites.

The launch of Drupal 7 was a perfect opportunity to begin the process of revamping the YaleSites offering, utilizing the experience gained with Drupal 6 and improving upon the existing system to provide a platform that addressed the needs of all – even the non-technical site builders. In this session, we will talk about:

  • D7 administrative interface: made it easier to manage content and administrative tasks.
  • Omega base theme: 3 flexible and mobile ready Yale Templates using Omega as the base theme.
  • Heavier use of Features module: to provide many of the common Content Types and Views – News listing, Rotating images, Calendar, Video listing, Photo Galleries – eliminating the need to manually build.
  • D7 Profile/People listing: Faculty and Staff listings are now easier to create using the People Feature that uses CAS and prepopulates user data from LDAP when adding users.
  • Improved file handling: Multiple files can be uploaded at one time, and better private file handling allows you to restrict downloading/viewing to a specific subset of users.
  • Restricted access: Can create private files, or restrict access to a Content Type and/or a specific node.
  • Yale-specific customizations, integrations and custom modules
    • CAS/LDAP
    • Bedework calendar
    • Filelocker 2
  • Github Enterprise and Jenkins for code management and deployment
  • Improved infrastructure
Schedule info
Status: 
Proposed
Session Info
Speaker(s): 
vinmassaro
nflowers1228
Track: 
Government, Nonprofit, and Education
Experience level: 
Beginner

Comments

rgristroph's picture rgristroph replied on

I'll attend this session, I think it is a huge project and I'll be interested to hear the details.

theMusician's picture theMusician replied on

As a fellow University Drupaler this session piqued my interest. We are doing a similar roll-out and would love to glean insights from the folks at Yale.

kevincrafts's picture kevincrafts replied on

I'm interested to see how another edu is doing this.

leoklein's picture leoklein replied on

Sounds neat (not to mention informative).