CEU Pilot Website Update 1 (Oct 2008)

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Let me briefly summarize some of the developments I've tried at the Pilot Drupal Website.

1. General site reorganization. I have re-organized the blocks and the menus to make them more logical.

  • As a general principle the "external" and content blocks are on the left-hand site (e.g. "Quick Links", "Research", "CEU News and Events" etc.
  • The "internal" and "interactive" content (User Login, Groups, links to Site Administration, etc.) are on the right-hand site.

2. The Newsletters. The SimpleNews module provided us with a possibility to create these straightforward Newsletters.

  • They are automatically emailed to subscribers (which you can manage - with permissions)
  • The users of the site can subscribe (or unsubscribe) to Newsletters by simply pressing relevant buttons in blocks (see the right-hand side as an example)
  • These Newsletters can also be assigned to Groups and linkes to various Group contents (e.g. when you go to a Group page they can show as a Group Newsletter;
  • Finally, these Newsletters are the same site content as "Pages", "Blogs" etc, which means that they can be tagged, placed in Feeds, Blogs, and the Menus. For example, if you click on Research @ CEU you will see a Research Menu with one of the entries to Research Newsletter. You can even make issues of a Newsletter pages of a Book!
  • In summary, I am happy with Newsletters Smile

3. Groups. Here I have had some limited success. I have set up three groups: PERG, Website Developers and Research.

  • These Groups have their own Webpages (just click on the group link on the right). They have their blogs etc. You can invite new members in the Group and (if you are a manager) make or un-make other members as managers;
  • Most of the content can be marked as "Group" content which will (a) make it invisible to the outside user; and (b) make it appear on the Group page. Moreover, I have modified the "Book Page" content so that it can be EDITED by the relevant group members. For example, the CEU Research Report can be edited by the Research Group members (access this report through the Research Portal)
  • I am still not sure I can 100% control what appears on the Group front page (not the blocks on both sides, but the content inside the page)

4. A book. As mentioned above, I have started a collective edited "Book" - CEU Research Report (go to Research @ CEU and click on Research Report)

5. Panels and views. I have started to play with these but then abandoned because I need more knowledge.

6. Key issues on the way ahead.

I see twopathways/challenges for further steps:

1) Making key structural choices, particularly about the organization of Minisites. Although this is a later stage in the development that we decided to focus on ministes, I would like some choices and steps to be taken already now. In particular, it is important how the minisite users will be organized, e.g. (a) through permissions; (b) through user groups; (c) through prefixes; (d) through multi-sites or other core database arrangements;

In relation to this we should probably learn a bit more about multiple sites and whether we need them. My knowledge of software is limited here, so let us discuss it.

2) Deciding on the way ahead. I suggest that we go full-time ahead with the Research Portal (opening it up for internal users at first) and start learning.