Turning Open Source On Its Side Drupal From The Top Down Building the GW Drupal Cookie Factory Mark R. Albert – Director, University Web Services Nadya Rose – Supervisor, Applications Integration Dhinakaran Thamanan Ramaian – Web Developer/Architect

The Summary The George Washington University has adopted the Drupal open-source Content Management System (CMS) for the centrally managed yet flexible CMS for the campus. While most Drupal implementations are single-purpose websites, GW has adapted this system to meet the needs of feature and security updates while allowing individual sites freedom to experiment. GW Drupal allows for quick deployment of a site allowing users to add content within hours where the previous system took weeks.

The Challenge Replace "best of breed" commercial enterprise content management system NOT suited to the decentralized nature of higher education Centrally managed to keep the system updated and constantly expanding the capabilities Flexible to satisfy independence of colleges and schools Strong pressure to select an open-source CMS Provision websites for departments and offices quickly The idea became known as “the cookie factory” – variety and consistency with the ability to support a number of customers quickly.

Designing The Factory Views Display Templates – Change display of views results through pane configuration Site Placement – Taxonomy tags used to specify the placement of content in a hierarchy Features – Content types, panelizer settings, image settings etc. packaged as modules Panels/Panelizer – Used for page layouts Themes – Control the look and feel

Building The Factory The Installation Profile (IP) – Collection of core, modules, themes and configurations that make up GW Drupal Used to create new sites as requested Profile updated as new items are released New versions created for IP when changes are major (1.x) Features Module – Used to move updates to existing sites Aegir – Site hosting module that is used to deploy sites from the IP Also used for backups and migrations to new versions Site on subdomains – supports GW URL strategy

The Results 200+ modules 109 sites live 100+ sites in content entry mode 15 minutes to provision site Three site types – Leadership, School, Main Responsive design incorporated into theme

The Specifications Drupal 7.1.5 – migrating to 7.2.3 Varnish for content caching – performance with pages displaying in under half second Approximately 100,000 hits daily All environments virtualized Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity achieved by utilizing GW’s two data centers – cloud being considered as well Load balanced service on web and database Integrated into GW architecture - connected to Enterprise Active Directory via LDAP module

The heavy lifting in the backend… … makes it easy to operate!!!

The Output

The Output

The Output

The Output

The Output

The Output

www.gwu.edu it.gwu.edu onlinestrategy.gwu.edu Resources www.gwu.edu it.gwu.edu onlinestrategy.gwu.edu

Contact Mark R. Albert Director of University Web Services Division of Information Technology The George Washington University malbert@gwu.edu 703.726.8393 Nadya Rose Supervisor of Applications Integration nrose@gwu.edu Dhinakaran (Dhina) Thamanan Ramaian Web Developer/Architect dhina@gwu.edu