1. 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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

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

9. The Output

10. The Output

11. The Output

12. The Output

13. The Output

14. The Output

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

16. Contact
Mark R. Albert Director of University Web Services Division of Information Technology The George Washington University Nadya Rose Supervisor of Applications Integration Dhinakaran (Dhina) Thamanan Ramaian Web Developer/Architect