Drupal on Rye is a brown bag, open forum that will attempt to draw  together intermediate to advanced OSU Drupal users who are interested in the  following:

• Providing feedback to CWS regarding OSU Drupal
• Establishing a real-life Drupal community with a focus on mutual  support and encouragement

The  Drupal on Rye atmosphere will be informal, flexible, and may include guest  speakers from CWS or other departments involved with OSU Drupal.  It will  take place in a seminar room to allow participants the ability to bring food  and beverages during discussion.  The primary focus of this forum is  discussion.  Participants can bring their own laptops if they wish to  review any websites discussed during the session.

Our  first session will be held on Feb. 17th from 11:30 to 1:00 pm in the  Willamette West Seminar Room, Rm. 3622, 3rd Floor Valley Library.  Follow  the provided URL for a map, if you’ve never visited Willamette West  before: http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/locations/floor3.html.

Topics  will be fielded prior to the event. If you have a particular topic or issue  you would like to discuss, feel free to submit it either via the Drupal  Support List at http://oregonstate.edu/tools/mailto/drupal_support or through a CWS Help Ticket at http://oregonstate.edu/cws/contact.  We can’t guarantee that all topics will be  covered in the given time and will give higher consideration to those topics  that are more universal in nature.

This is  an experimental pilot forum.  Continuation of this event will hinge on  the demonstrated participation of 10 or more users.  If successful, CWS  will offer this opportunity on an ongoing basis.

We hope  to see you there!

This is a great opportunity to meet more folks in the community of Drupal users. You’ll certainly run into some folks from Web Comm if you go.

Do you have other ideas for topics, seminars and workshops that you’d like to see happening on campus? Be sure to join the OSU IMC Network on Ning (imcnet.ning.com), and become a member of the Web Communicators sub-group.  Suggest your topics there, or in the comments on this blog post.

We’ve also been testing with users, gathering feedback on the visual design and layout. Reviews have been promising so far. Students, staff and faculty have rated the new design higher, the layout easier to use, and the content more organized. You may have seen us set up in the MU, giving away pizza or Powered by Orange gear in exchange for a few minutes of users’ time.

So check out the design and let us know what you think. Our goal is to have the new home page and top-tier pages launched this Spring.

Mock-up of new home page

The themed intros tie into the PBO campaign and focus on the areas of food, energy and water.

The video intros we created for the Powered by Orange campaign are now available for download and incorporation with your video projects. In this phase of the campaign we’re trying to emphasize the positive impact that Oregon State makes in the areas of food, energy and water.

If you have similarly themed material, and you think these would be an enhancement, feel free to use them. They’ve really helped to add a level of polish to our PBO video series, which is now focusing on research impact in the three key areas.br

A large number of OSU sites have moved to Drupal, and more are making the switch all the time.  Central Web Services offers robust support and training, and we will have a new highly customizable theme available soon as well.

We also should acknowledge the role our Open Source Lab plays in supporting the Drupal development community.

The fact that the President’s site is now hosted on our platform is good news for us.

Students and staff gather in the MU quad for orange giveaways on Monday, September 1st.

We’ve launched the latest version of the Powered by Orange Web site. So far, the PBO initiative has netted us thousands of pageviews and thousands more social media connections. This week’s events marry online activities with live events to celebrate the start of a new communications effort, a new school year, and a year of OSU contributions to Oregon and beyond.

Congratulations go out to you, the web and marketing teams and anyone else who touches the Oregon State University website because you’re all doing a tremendous job at effectively optimizing your site for search engines.

Recognition also needs to go to our Admissions and Enrollment Web and marketing folks who’ve led OSU’s SEO performance efforts.

More student blogs can be found at blogs.oregonstate.edu, which also houses blogs for faculty and staff. This blog service was created by CWS and is based on Wordpress MU, providing an easy way for anyone in the OSU community to create and customize their own blog.

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This is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. – Clay Shirky

But we also did something different. Celene Carillo, our Web Writer, took part in a revolution. She live-tweeted the morning’s proceedings from OSU’s official Twitter feed. That’s a first for Oregon State. Celene has built our feed up to a respectable 900 followers in only a few months, and, more important, has managed to foster conversation and establish connections to OSU students, grads, alumni, staff and others on an individual basis. We’ll work to continue to build such connections with new grads and young alums through our Powered by Orange Twitter, Facebook and Linked In efforts, as well as a number of other initiatives taking place on the social Web. About fifty new followers joined during the course of graduation, and Celene interacted with grads who were tweeting right from the floor of Reser. While those are very real connections, especially for an institutional voice, they may still seem like a modest form of communication.

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But Twitter is proving this week to be anything but a modest form of communication. There’s a revolution happening in Iran, much of it fostered by the conversations happening on Twitter. In fact, this Web service was even tapped on the shoulder by the U.S. State Department, who asked them to postpone their regularly scheduled maintenance so as not to impact the role that Twitter was playing in the mass demonstrations growing in Tehran.

Our grads are heading out into a changing world. It’s evolving before our eyes, technologically and politically. As Web communicators, we deal with many of these changes on a daily basis, and as soon as we get a handle on something, it seems to slip out of our grasp. We all know there’s a lot of potential in the changing Web. But it’s also frightening and exsasperating as we’re forced to give up control of the message and watch colleagues in the traditional media struggle with this revolution. Add to this the uncertain economic climate that our newest alumni now face, and it can be downright frightening.

But if we meet this unquiet revoution with a small measure of the hope and confidence of those new grads who left Reser Stadium with their families and friends last Saturday, we’ll be just fine.

CWS will be providing a series of information sessions and training opportunites around the new Drupal 6 roll-out, and the Media Manger utility.  The times are below. And if you ever have questions about how Media Manger relates to our channels on YouTube and iTunes U, just leave us a comment or contact us directly.

OSU Media Manager Introduction – April 6

This is an overview presentation regarding the new media converter and manager we are releasing to the OSU community.

There will be two presentations for this. The first will be a big one, with space for about 60 people, on April 6, 2009 in the MU Journey Room from 10:00 to 11:30. The second will be smaller, with space for about 20, on April 10th, 2009 in the Valley Library Willamette West Conference Room from 1:00 to 2:30.

The actual presentation / demonstration will take roughly an hour. We’ve also booked enough time to answer questions afterwards. There is no fee or registration requirements.

What’s New With Drupal 6? – April 8 and 14

This is an overview presentation regarding the upcoming Drupal 6 upgrade. Here we will be explaining a few things, such as: module changes, permission set and access role changes and general improvements.

CWS will be releasing their first round of Drupal 6 training starting on April 21st. To learn more about this, you can visit WebTrain, the CWS training site  and view our upcoming workshops in the left sidebar, or you can view and register for upcoming workshops via the Professional Development Central Registration site at http://oregonstate.edu/training

There will be two presentations for this, as well, on April 8, 2009 from 10:00 to 11:30 and on April 14, 2009 from 1:00 to 2:30. Both presentations will be held in the Valley Library Willamette West Conference Room.

The actual presentation/demonstration will take roughly an hour. We’ve also booked enough time to answer questions afterwards. There is no fee or registration requirements.