Category Archives: Drupal

Let’s Talk Drupal 7

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So let’s talk Drupal 7, and some bits and bytes about Drupal in general.  Central Web Services maintains a central Drupal installation.  Like any piece of software, it has multiple versions.  Drupal 5, 6, 7, and 8 which is in development.  The CWS stable version is Drupal 6.  Drupal 5 is no longer supported.  Right now we are getting numerous requests for Drupal 7.

We want to let you all know that we are actively working to get Drupal 7 tested, documented, and functional for the needs of OSU.  Well, why can’t I just get it now, it’s just a download, you ask?  The answer is, while if you were hosting on your own ISP this would be the case, the OSU infrastructure is such that we have to ensure security, reliability as well as integrations with other solutions, such as authentication, themes and modules in use by OSU CWS Drupal sites.  We have a number of concurrent activities happening to make progress toward rolling this out for the University, including actively working on the theme necessary for Drupal 7 (yes we have to rewrite the theme to work for new Drupal versions).  This is in partnership with the rock-star team over in Web Communications.

Now more importantly, what we are trying to do with Drupal 7 is reduce our site footprint and number of individual sites.  Can you believe we have over 400 sites?  That becomes a maintenance and support headache.  With Drupal 7, there will be a new feature called Organic Groups.  This will allow us to have a smaller subset of sites, and areas and departments within the same site but still allow the finer grained control that some of you desire.  With Organic Groups, you will be able to take control of the portion of the site that is your relevant content, and have control so others cannot access that portion of the site as a Drupal administrator to modify something in error.  This is where we want to go and what makes sense for Oregon State University.

So when will this be done?  With Organic Groups, we are in the pilot stage with Information Services, and then we are going to ensure we have it done right by piloting the College of Liberal Arts.  Doing this we will ensure we understand the technology well enough to teach, document, and support it going forward so people are not left out on their own to figure things out.

Individual main colleges in working with Web Communications can look at Drupal 7 with the Doug Fir Theme (the theme that we have available for Drupal 7), and then incorporate changes for Organic Groups as we roll that out.  Science and Liberal Arts main college sites are already in Drupal 7.

Departments however, we will not be rolling out with Drupal 7 at this time, as they are to be incorporated into Organic Groups, working with your colleges, once we roll out Organic Groups.

For those sites that are in Drupal 6 and want to look like the main college sites that are using Drupal 7 Doug Fir, we are working on a version of Doug Fir for Drupal 6.

What is Doug Fir?  So besides being an evergreen confier species, Doug Fir is an OSU responsive Drupal theme.  This means that the site resizes depending on the device that you are on.  Liberal Arts is a good site to see using this theme.

For us it is imperative that we do this right and do not add to the overhead and support it would take to enable OSU.  This is why you might hear us say that we are not providing Drupal 7 to individual sites at this time.

Our rough timeline as of now is:

  • Spring and Summer to test and roll out Organic Groups.
  • Winter:  Migrate Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7
  • 2014 Drupal 6 moves to maintenance fixes only
  • 2015 End of Life (EOL) Drupal 6

With all of this we are re-architecting the infrastructure, and then we will have Drupal 8 on the Horizon.

We hope this information helps you to be aware of the progress we are making.

Bringing Home the Silver – Design and Development

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Case Award Silver Team

No oops, but we did it again.  Add another award winning design and implementation for the category of Overall Website in the CASE VIII 2012 Communication Awards.  Oregon State University proudly brought home the Silver for the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences Website.  If you don’t know by now the work of Web Communications and Central Web Services, you should.  For the Central Web Services team of Sher Fenn, Paul Lieberman and Mauricio Cordoba, congratulations!  Congratulations to Web Communications and CPHHS team members.  It was a truly a team effort and another win-win-win for OSU in its collaborative efforts.  This could not have happened by any of us individually and reflects what comes from working together.

Visiting DrupalCon 2011

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I'm attending DrupalCon Chicago, March 7-10, 2011Oregon State University has representative members at DrupalCon 2011 in Chicago.  The conference is a great way to hear about user experiences, get tips on how people approach development, and new services available that may benefit the University and others.  Central Web Services and Web Communications are attending numerous sessions as we look to determine where to take Drupal sites in the future for OSU.

The conference started out on day 1 with a Drupal music intro form members of Acquia, followed by the key note from Dries Buytaert, who spoke briefly about Drupal 7 and went into the aspects that worked well, and not so well.  This segued to more on the new approach to Drupal 8, and the announcement that development on Drupal 8 opens on March 8th.

There was a slide on the devices and market share of devices over time, and not-so-surprisingly, mobile devices are now in the lead, over desktops and notebooks.  Tablets were also a part of the chart, and it was interesting to see on there, as my view also is that touch technologies will change the face of education, with the proper embrace of it.  Dries stated that if they were to start Drupal now, they would start with mobile devices.  He went on to focus on key initiatives he envisioned for Drupal 8, and that he’ll be looking for leads for the initiatives.  What I liked was the fact that performance was also something they want to put as an up front consideration instead of an afterthought.

Following the keynote, after a lunch session, and a BOF discussion, the day sessions began.  Oh, what’s a BOF?  BOF is Birds of a Feather, and what was done was some rooms opened up to groups of community members to get together to talk about mutual interests.  We participated in the uWEBd BOF for University Web Developers, with representative University individuals sharing experiences and how they use technologies.  I believe we can do more with Universities, such as setting up a common edu git location for all Universities to participate in module development, as an example.  There’s more we can do to collaborate, it’s looking at the right strategy that can benefit many, followed by commitment and then execution.

There were also discussions ongoing with the core team, or those dedicated set of people focused on making the core of drupal moving forward.

Overall a good first day that sparks innovative minds to think about how to do things better, and how to tackle problems in the way things are.