We had another successful meeting of the Drupal on Rye group.  It was a smaller group than we had last month.  There were 16 people in attendance, including representatives from CWS, Web Communications, College of Forestry, Extension, College of Ag,  Sea Grant, TSS, International Programs, Center for Humanities, and Horticulture.

Employee/Faculty CCK and Views

We looked at several employee CCKs that have been built by Web Communications and Extension.  This  list included:

We decided that it made sense to pursue a campus wide CCK as a starting point.  We will follow with an additional blog post dedicated to this issue.

Campus Taxonomies

The idea behind campus taxonomies is that there would be distinct taxonomies that could be downloaded and installed into your Drupal website.  Each taxonomy could be built by a Subject Matter Expert and provided to the rest of campus for use.  The taxonomies would be granular, so you could choose the appropriate taxonomies to include.

David Barner showed us some taxonomies that he is working on for the new OSU homepage project.  In addition, some specific taxonomies including Colleges, UHDS, Financial Aid, Information Technology, and Buildings were mentioned.

Before we can move in this direction, CWS needs to investigate a module to allow us to import taxonomies.  This is on our list and we will keep the community informed of our progress.

CWS Drupal Downloads

CWS has added a section to our website, Programming @ CWS.  As a part of this, we’ve added a section for sharing reusable Drupal code such as CCKs and Views.   For now, we’ve started with a CCK and View containing a block for displaying a Random Fact on your Drupal website.  An example of this can be seen as the “Did you know…?” block featured on in the right sidebar of the CWS website.  We’ll be adding more details to this section of our site as time goes on.

New Drupal on Rye blog

We have a new blog for keeping the community informed about the happenings with Drupal.  It will feature information from OSU community members.  If you are interesting in being an author on the blog, please let CWS know by sending in a help ticket.

OSU Drupal 6.16

CWS will be pushing updates to OSU Drupal 6 development sites this week.  This includes updates to

  • Upgrading Drupal core to version 6.16
  • Performance fix for OSU Confident
  • Updates to modules
    • IMCE WYSIWYG Bridge
    • Pathauto
    • Menu Breadcrumb
  • Issue with images in Announcement summaries
  • Update Search module to use new OSU search (not beta)

Future Meetings

The previous date of April 12th is no longer valid.  A new date for April will be set and sent out to the list soon.

Here is the agenda for our March 17th Meeting.  The meeting will take place from 11:30am-1:00pm in Willamette West, Rm 3622, 3rd Floor Valley Library

  • Employee/Faculty CCK and Views
    • We’ll start with a recent CCK developed by David Barner from Web Comm and discuss how we may be able to adjust it so that it could meet the needs of most of campus.
  • Campus Taxonomies
    • Based upon a request from Rachel Faber-Machacha from International Programs, we will discuss the possibility of having specific taxonomies that can be used on all sites, and possibly integrate with campus-wide CCKs and Views
  • CWS Website update
    • New section on the CWS to provide centralized access to campus-wide CCKs, Views, etc.

As a note, we will be testing out videotaping this session to see if providing online videos of the session on the web is a workable solution for people who cannot attend.

Optional enrollment (to let us know who is coming) can be done at the Professional Development website.