Working Together
Central Web Services and University Advancement have collaborated to release Drupal to the OSU community. Drupal provides a usable, maintainable, and secure content management solution to all of campus.
Ensuring that Drupal sites stay up to date and feature full, Central Web Services handles all operations and maintenance of Drupal. University Advancement focuses their Drupal efforts on the documentation and support of sites developed using OSU's adaptation of Drupal
In addition to the collaboration between CWS and Advancement, we encourage the OSU community to share experience and information about Drupal at informal monthly user group meetings and over the community mailing list.
Features of Drupal
Drupal is a robust content management system, providing many features including:
- Web based administration - Edit pages through your browser, right where they live.
- Page approval queue - Two eyes look over every page before it goes live.
- Page check out - Stops work loss due to miscommunication
- Version control of submitted pages - Roll back at anytime.
- Friendly URLs such as: oregonstate.edu/cws/portfolio - Easy to find pages with a clear location in your site.
Open Source Software
Due to the fact that Drupal is open source, OSU gets to participate in a large community of users, administrators, and developers all over the world. Leveraging this infrastructure, an open source CMS will provide us a great base application, with great modules and great documentation.
The openness of Drupal allows us customize the user experience and create new modules to add functionality. When appropriate, this also lets OSU contribute back to Drupal with new modules or patches.
Development
Work started on Drupal with an evaluation of how well it would fit into the hosting environment at OSU. Drupal proved to be a good solution due to it's maturity, community, infrastructure requirements, and update schedule.
After the evaluation, work shifted to making Drupal fit into OSU. WebManage, CWS's website management software, was modified to accommodate web applications. Many Drupal modules were written, one to interface with Single Sign On, an approval queue, etc. University Publications is active in writing documentation for user support and training.
Current Sites
To get more information about moving a website to OSU's implementation of Drupal:
- Fill out our Request Access form and mention Drupal
OR
- Contact University Publications about setting up a new site.