This is a presentation that a UD colleague and I did at Villanova on March 30, 2009. We were asked to share our strategies and challenges in implementing Drupal as a campus-wide IT-hosted service.

1. How the University of Delaware is Deploying Drupal
March 30, 2009
Tina Callahan
tina.callahan@udel.edu
Richard Gordon
richard@udel.edu

2. Outline
 Selection of Drupal at UD
 Basic design of UD Drupal services
 Challenges and Opportunities
 Possible next steps

3. In the beginning…
 Size and diversity of population
 20,000+ students
 4,000+ faculty/staff
 Various web development efforts
 Majority in Dreamweaver templates
 Keeping websites fresh was a challenge
 Varied skill of developers
 Central web server and distributed web servers
 Time and money vs. effectiveness of site

4. And, then there was change
 New Administration
 Budget Woes
 Branding exercise
 Need for…
Efficient workflow
 Consistent and branded appearance
 Dynamic content
 Embedded media files
 Additional tools and services (SEO, RSS feeds, calendars)
 Flexibility

5. A CMS can help!
 Database driven
 Separation of design and content (Template adoption)
 Uses cascading style sheets (CSS) for layout and design
 Accessible from anywhere
 Managed through the web site interface
 Content publishing can be managed
 No HTML knowledge is necessary (content providers)
 Saves times (especially with multiple editors)
 Content is search engine friendly
 Content is syndicated (by default)

6. Selecting Drupal
 Information Technologies (IT) chaired CMS committee
 faculty and staff from UD colleges
 administrative staff
 IT staff
 staff from UD Office of Communication and Marketing
(OCM).
 Looked at…
 Other Universities
 Commercial CMS products
 Open-source CMS products.
 After a series of focus group meetings, Drupal was selected!

7. What is Drupal?
Drupal is…
 A database-driven web application written in PHP.
 An open-source Content Management System (CMS) freely
available under the GPL.
 A community building platform.
 A web development framework. Use Drupal as a platform
to build a broad range of web applications.
-Source: Drupal For Education and E-Learning, Author: Bill Fitzgerald

8. What is Drupal?
Drupal supports… Drupal permits you…
 websites  to define access rules for
registered users. (This
 secure or public blogging
helps to define what the
 forum discussions
user can do on your site.)
 polls
 change the look (A.K.A.
 stories and books
theme) of your site without
 syndication of content touching the content.
 Web2.0 applications
(social bookmarking, etc.)

9. What is Drupal?
• Started in 2000 by Dries Buytaert
in his college dormitory
• Began as a personal project to
communicate and share information with
friends
• “Dorpje” = Dutch word for village
• Typo when searching for available
domain names resulted in Drop.org
• “Druppel” = Dutch word for drop
• Official Release in 2001
History of Drupal: http://drupal.org/node/297669

10. Drupal is Free
Free as in “freedom” Free as in “free beer”

11. What is Drupal?
 Drupal now used by a wide variety of commercial and
educational institutions.
 Meteoric growth reported at DrupalConDC earlier this
month:
 1.5 million unique logins/month to drupal.org
 200,000 downloads of the Drupal core per month (last year)
 Over 4,000 user-contributed modules
 Last year, 100% growth.
 “Hundreds of thousands of sites; thousands of developers.”
- Dries Buytaert, March 13, 2009

15. Drupal
is a
CMS

16. Drupal
is a
Framework
Robust &
Extensible!!

17. Drupal
is a
Community
Anyone can submit
patches,
documentation,
modules, and themes.
Frequent release cycle
of core.
Regular security audits
from security team and
3rd party members.

18. Basic Design of UD Drupal Services
 3 web servers
 Sun Fire X2200 M2
 Dual 2.3 GHZ AMD Opteron Quad Core Processor
 8 Gigabytes RAM
 1 Terabyte Mirrored Hard Disk
 Running Solaris 10 X86 Kernel Patch 138889-02

19. Basic Design of UD Drupal Services
 Apache 2.2.6
 PHP 5.2.5
 MySQL 5.0.67
 Drupal 6.10
 Modules selected by Drupal Steering and vetted by IT
 All modules at full version release only – no beta modules
permitted
 One Drupal code-base with “vetted modules” = UD core
 Multi-site installation; easier patching and upgrades

20. User perspective of Drupal services
Drupal-prod
Drupal-dev
• Limited File • No file system
system access access
• Backup nightly • Backup nightly
• DB • DB
• File System • File System
• User performs • Content editing,
development and modification
Drupal-test
• Implementation of
testing
• No user access
• Initial content tested functionalities
• Backup nightly
creation (Major • DB
• File System
upgrades)
• IT “sandbox” –
testing versions,
updates

21. Online Resources IT – User Ed
Workshops
Webdev Community
& Consultations
UD Drupal
Documentation
Training & Support Drupal Workouts
Opportunities
IT Help Center
Mini-workshops

22. The Community at Work!
 Drupal Steering Committee created.
 Comprised of Drupal developers on campus
 Mission: to drive IT towards hosting a desirable web
development package that is well-suited for the entire
UD campus.

23. The Community at Work!
 Drupal Steering Committee in action:
 Stay current on new Drupal developments and on UD
campus desire for new functionality.
 Funnel campus requests for new functionality in “UD
core Drupal.”
 Advise IT on the usefulness of requested modules.
 Encourage IT to grow Drupal services with the current
community-wide demand.

24. Timeline for IT Drupal Services
 Drupal Selected: February 2008
 Preparation: February – November 2008
 Hire Tina: December 2008
 “Alpha” Development: December ‘08 – January ’09
 Steering Committee Formed: February 2009
 “Beta” Development: February – March 2009
 First live site: April 2009
 Basic Support: Summer 2009
 Full Support: Fall 2009

25. Challenges & Opportunities
 Security vs. Flexibility
 Drupal is modular
 IT-hosted vs. locally hosted - user must decide
 Support
 Strength of the Web Developer community
 Volunteer-based
 Drupal is new to IT staff; learning curve

26. Challenges & Opportunities
 Timeline
 Web refresh
 RBB – departments are accountable for recruitment and
publicized signs of excellence
 Building a robust package for generic use
 Automation
 Maintenance of possible 300+ sites
 Server loads
 Module adoption, deprecation, core upgrades
 Update.php

27. Next Steps: Automation
 Current requests for Drupal sites are handled
manually and each site is configured manually by the
site admin.
 The process can be automated so that a user can
submit a form that generates a site with theme,
modules, and user roles pre-activated.

28. Next Steps: Virtualization
 Virtualization fits in with one of our campus-wide
“Green Initiatives.”
 Like an ISP, we could offer virtualization on a central
system rather than departments owning their own
servers for Drupal and other applications.
 Would offer more flexibility in how each Drupal site is
configured.

29. Next Steps: UD-Drupal Bundles
 Remember: UD environment includes central Drupal
service and a robust community of departmental
Drupal servers—real and virtual.
 Bundle UD Core Drupal, modules, and documentation
for download to departmental servers.
 Departments will be able to use or modify UD Core as
suits their needs.

30. Next Steps: Leveraging Drupal’s Power
 Current Focus: Developers and Site Admins
 Drupal’s Power: We can configure roles and modules
to allow content providers with minimal computing
experience to take control of their content.
 Separation of Content and Presentation: “End User”
can concentrate on content; “Site Admin” (or IT) on
presentation.

31. Questions and Discussion
 Tina Callahan
Project Lead, Drupal
Office of Information Technologies
University of Delaware
tina.callahan@udel.edu
 Richard Gordon
Acting Manager, IT Communication Group
Office of Information Technologies
University of Delaware
richard@udel.edu