The Drupal experience in building a graduate university website

This session will present why and how the CEU website is using Drupal. Universities have several "units" with the need for a website, such as departments, centers, programs, projects, etc. Our aim is to create a system which makes it easy to create and maintain such "minisites" delivering them with both shared and unique content/design elements. According to these needs, the main aim of this session is to demonstrate two different approaches of running multiple websites with one Drupal installation: one based on Organic Groups and another based on Domain Access.

Minisites in our system are using their own theme. To reduce future theme maintaince time we implemented advanced theme techniques along with mass use of sub-theming capabilities available in Drupal 6.x. Using our approach as an example, we will take a deeper look into Drupal's theme layer and sub-theming feature.

Finally, as Drupal can be used to easily build some internal-use features, we will take a look at CEU's "Documents Hub" as an example. Users with the proper permission are allowed to upload "Official CEU documents". However, members of the "gatekeeper" role have to approve all such documents to be published. We will take a look at how workflows can help us in such a situation.

Agenda
* Abstract
* Why Drupal? - strengths and weaknesses of usage for a University
* Goals - our vision for a successful University website delivered by Drupal
* Where are we now? Snapshot - current website features
* How we got there
* Q/A – closure