Overview
Portland State University (PSU) has the largest overall enrollment of any university in Oregon. PSU's aging Content Management System (CMS) was based on Binary Cloud, and was unsuitable to adapt to growth. So they sought out a new system that would serve the university's needs. One the developers at PSU was familiar with the capabilities of Drupal, and eventually through an RFP/RFQ process, Swipht Technologies was chosen to help PSU migrate 60+ department sites into a single codebase of Drupal.
According to Swipht, it was the largest scale Drupal integration at that time. According to Swipht, "the new system had to support central sign-on, a sophisticated security policy, and provide a means to share content between different departments and organization websites."
The solution included contributed modules and custom module development to adress the needs. It was basically done in several stages. The first stage was the design and development of a flexible department site which included a deployment process that rapidly deployed sites (installation profile). The second included a central syndication server to provide shared content and media to department sites on demand. The third effort involved the actual migration of content and structure from the old CMS into the new multi-site Drupal framework.
They do not use reverse proxy or other configurations. PSU's servers run on load balanced servers using standard Drupal caching. Their multi-site installation runs under a single Drupal code base, so upgrades only need to be done once at the root level.
PSU's Overview of the Process
Kristin Boden-MacKay, the Director of Web Communications at Portland State University had some good insight into their process.
In short, the whole process took about a year a half. Kristin came in about halfway through the process, after they had already chosen the vendor. As of December 2009, They have 122 distinct sites on their Drupal codebase, and plan to continue migration of more sites. They have about 640 sites in total, so it will be a long, continuous process. She classifies their system as an enterprise solution.
Their old setup was on a BinaryCloud development platform. They are very happy with the new Drupal platform which they've had for over 2 years now, and they have had no problems with it. University Communications provides the templates to the departments, and gives them access to their "sites", from which they can create their web pages and menus.
Kristin related that there's not an easy way to create content in multiple environments—that Drupal is not built to that capacity. I believe that was the reason for the media/syndication server, to share content and certain database tables as needed, while maintaining administrative separation using the multi-site approach.
[Here are some links to multi-site configurations: Drupal multisite, managing multisite, scalability]
Unified Vision
Their identity process is led at the president's level, and they have a unified vision to continue integrating Drupal campus-wide. The department sites do not permit administration of modules or allow PHP scripting in their pages. They work from the basic install profile that is deployed for their site. This gives departments the flexibility they need, but keeps things simple for them and easy to administer content.
Swipht Technologies
They did run over budget and Swipht took a little longer than they planned to complete the whole process, but it was a large work. The project management was not quite as clean as she would have liked to have seen, but in the end it worked out well.
Swipht did not do any of the design work. It was done in house by PSU. Swipht converted the designs into code (HTML and PHP = aka: Drupal theme). And of course Swipht did the consulting, drupal programming and integration of the multiple sites, as well as creating the custom tool to install (replicate) "multisites". (Aegir has matured since then. I don't believe PSU is using Aegir.)
Workflow Processes
They don't have much automated "workflow" processes in place for content approval (for example, they don't have a specialized process for people to contribute to the event calendar, etc.). Actually, they're trying to cut back on the number of pages. She said they have over 300,000 pages being served throughout the campus, and are trying to trim that down as they integrate more sites into their Drupal 'network'.
Here are some specifics about Swipht's work with PSU, taken from Swipht's website:
Drupal Department Site Features:
- Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
- Ldap user account migration (custom work)
- Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
- Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
- Google Search Appliance Integration
- Per-site media management
- WYSIWYG Editor integration
- Generic Analytics integration (custom work)
- Google Analytics integration
- Search Engine Optimized XML Sitemap
- Content Access Security (custom work)
- Menu Access Security (custom work)
- Syndication client management and display (custom work)
- PSU Drupal theme (used on all sites)
- PSU Home Drupal theme
- Sophisticated Drupal theme settings and media management (custom work)
Drupal Syndication Server Features:
- Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
- Ldap user account migration (custom work)
- Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
- Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
- Content Access Security (custom work)
- Menu Access Security (custom work)
- Custom content authoring (news, events, profiles, faqs)
- Multi-category tagging and classification system
- Web-services XML syndication framework (community/custom work)
PSU Contact Information
University Communications:
General Contacts:
- Phone: 503-725-3711
- Fax: 503-725-4465
- ucomm@pdx.edu
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