Here is the summary of various developments (and ideas) for the CEU Pilot Drupal Website

New users and user roles

I have also worked a bit with User Roles. Now the role Web Administrator is preserved for the Web Development Team (essentially, they have all the permissions on the site). The new role called Content and Structure Editor can modify the content and change Taxonomies, Blocks and Menus, but cannot administer Users or anything else. Most of the new users have the Content and Structure Editor role.

Bibliography

After the Bibliography module was installed I spent quite a lot of time working with it. Now it can do the following:

• Provide a list of publications on user Profile pages;
• Provide a link to "My pubications" in the Navigation menu (on the right);
• Provide the full list of publications, search and filter by Author, Keyword, etc.
• Use the same keywords (taxonomies) for pubications as for the rest of the site;
• Generate links to publications of specific units, departments, research centers etc.
• Contain full texts of publications as attachments or HTML inserts;

The bad news are that the Biblio module in Drupal 6.x is believed to be unstable so I have initiated consultations with the Drupal development community discussing how this can be overcome. In particular, I have contacted the developer of the module and a company that provides advice for using Drupal in education (see www.funnymonkey.com).

A Minisite

I have started to work on a sample Research Center minisite. I have used the following approach:

• A minisite is created as a "Group node" (i.e. you create a group through Create Group) action; thus, to create the CENES ministe I simply created CENSE Group;
• Now, all the content (e.g. Page, Blog, Publication, Newsletter, etc.) that is marked as belonging to that Group automatically feeds onto this Group node (I gave this one the alias "http://web2.ceu.hu/cense")
• Moreover, because this is Group node, Drupal displays some group-specific menus on the right-hand side (e.g. members of the Group etc.)
• The main minisite menu becomes visible by recognizing the URL element e.g. "cenes" of the Minisite (one needs to remember to specify custom URL for each path that logically belongs to the minisite);
• This main menu is at the moment very basic, it has links to "About", "Programs", "People" and "Publications". 
  • • The "About" and "Programs" are normal Drupal pages (or nodes) with URL aliases "ceres/about" and "ceres/programs"; the Director of the Center is currently working on entering the content
    • The "Publications" element is organized by adding "CENSE" a unit to relevant publications (a special unit taxonomy has been created); I think it is simple and effective, but I am sure we will find a more elegant solution in the future;
    • The "People" element is organized by finding all users whose profiles specify CENSE as their secondary affiliation; once again, many other solutions may be found.

    A couple of ideas

Look of the site

I have not experimented with changing the look of the site, however, I easily found the *.css file that defines it. It is located in the Theme (we use the Garland theme) directory and looks pretty straightforward. The name is Style.css. Anyone who knows how to deal with an CSS file can edit it to create the look we want. Several such files can be created to come up with the CEU 'corporate themes' that can be used by the minisites. I will further look into the issue - Drupal seems to have many modules which allow customizing the Themes without editing CSS directrly.

Richer user profiles. Nodeprofile module

It would be great to be able to link user profiles to the same taxonomies that the rest of the site content. For example, to find out all those users who deal with "migration". At the moment it is solved through defining User's areas of expertise, but these are separate from everything else. Moreover, it would be nice to associate certain nodes with certain users. For example, now we can associate Publications with Users (through "My publications" etc.) becase we have the Biblio module, but what if I want to do the same with "Courses" or "Projects". For example, on the Amhurst website each Faculty profile has a list of courses taught by that faculty. Moreover, people may want to have more information in their profile pages than is given by our standard profile fields. I think that Nodeprofile package will address most of these issues. I will ask to download it and inform you further.

Complex content. The Content Construction Kit (CCK)

What if we want to create more complex content than normally allowed by Drupal? For example, "courses" where we will specify the level, the start date, the fee etc. Or "research project" where we will specify the funder etc? The CCK module would allow to customize content by adding different fields as we please.