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Drupal at Digital Library and Information Technology at Cornell University

I was invited to make a presentation on the library's move to Drupal for the Cornell Computing Directors meeting 2/9/2010. Here are some notes on the topic. -JGReidy

Commonspot at CUL
- How was CommonSpot chosen for CUL?
  
  Spearheaded by the newly formed Office of Web Communication, in Spring 2004, a campus-wide committee representing several Cornell units created an RFP to select a campus-wide web content management system for Cornell. The Library participated in the evaluation team to identify a common solution for effective management of web content. After evaluating several systems and inviting a few vendors to the campus, during Fall 2004 CommonSpot was chosen for a campus-wide implementation. CUL partnered with CIT, the College of Engineering, the ILR School, and the Office of Web Communication in raising the funds to license the CommonSpot Content Management System (CMS).
- We decided to run our own installation on a dedicated server since we had so many sites to support
- We were not experienced with ColdFusion, and ended up with a non-standard setup for test and production versions of sites
- Content contributors had problems with the editor, didn't like all the popup windows and clicking required. Infrequent users found it hard to remember how to edit pages.
- Designers didn't all the extra markup inserted by the editor or the base templates - inflexible after site launch and mixed html and coldfusion code.
- Programmers didn't like the proprietary database format, the inability to see the actual code, and the Javascript stampted on every page.
- Systems people didn't like having to restart the server daily to compensate for memory leaks, or to reverse engineer the database format, or to have to run another boutique machine.
- We ended up with 13 sites in production, 2 more sites under development, and 8 sites that were canceled before they were in production.
- February 5, 2010 we shut down our Commonspot server, having migrated all the viable sites to either Drupal, Confluence, or Dreamweaver/Contribute.
How we chose Drupal
- The committee that built the new (2008) main CUL web page evaluated several options and decided on Drupal
  - How the WebVision committee decided on Drupal
  - The CUL Vision Report (a .pdf document) - Web Site Development Recommendations - 5/24/2008
- Many of us were working on the main CUL site redesign, gained experience with Drupal in the process, and saw that it was a good tool.
- It made sense to develop/convert other web sites with the same tool.
- We decided to stop supporting CommonSpot, and developed tools to migrate the CommonSpot sites to Drupal.
About Drupal
- Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
- Built in features include web based content management and administration, user authentication, role based permission system, SEO features, threaded comments, blogs, version control, content syndication, caching, and extension capabilities based on modules.
- Community contributed modules include text editors, media handlers, SEO tools, online form handlers, date and calendar tools, javascript tools, user interface enhancements, surevy tools, shopping carts, anti-spam tools, and social engagement tools.
- Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("GNU General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.
- Awarded Best Open Source PHP CMS 2009(Wordpress won Overall in 2009) - also Overall Winner 2008, 2007
- Basics
  - All the data entry is done through the browser. There are role based permissions to control who can enter what data. Users have to log in to the site to enter data.
  - Content is stored in 'Nodes'. Nodes have a title, a body, menu settings, revision information, URL settings, comment settings, author information, and publishing options. The user can add more fields to nodes to make different types of nodes.
  - Nodes have a default display, but one or more nodes can be displayed together in a 'View'. Views control which fields of the node display, and can filter to select which nodes display. One or more views can be displayed on a page of the site.
  - There is built in support for basic site navigation, search, file uploading, authentication, comments, contact forms, etc.
  - There are many different 'Themes' (skins) available.
DLIT Drupal Sites

Test Site	Production Site	Features
test.2cul.library.cornell.edu		Collaboration with Columbia University
test.aerial-ny.library.cornell.edu	aerial-ny.library.cornell.edu	Aerial Photos, Mapping, interface to LUNA (Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.asia.library.cornell.edu	asia.library.cornell.edu	(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.clo.library.cornell.edu
test.communications.library.cornell.edu	communications.library.cornell.edu	(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.cuneiform.library.cornell.edu		Cuneiform Tablets
test.engineering.library.cornell.edu	engineering.library.cornell.edu	(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.eship.library.cornell.edu	entrepreneurship.cornell.edu	Interface to VIVO
test.lts.library.cornell.edu	lts.library.cornell.edu	(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.mathematics.library.cornell.edu	mathematics.library.cornell.edu	(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.psl.library.cornell.edu	physicalsciences.library.cornell.edu	Virtual Library (Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.research.library.cornell.edu	research.library.cornell.edu	Surveys (Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.seanews.library.cornell.edu		Southeast Asia Newspapers
test.socialwelfare.library.cornell.edu		(Formerly CommonSpot site)
test.staffweb.library.cornell.edu	staffweb.library.cornell.edu	Internal site protected by CUWebAuth
wwwstage.library.cornell.edu	www.library.cornell.edu	Main Cornell Library site
test.wordsworth.library.cornell.edu
?	mannlib.cornell.edu	Mann Library (Formerly CommonSpot site)

Drupal Modules we use