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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Aug
28
(2006)
University of Calgary’s Website Now Powered by Drupal
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: drupal, ucalgary, website.
The U of C threw the switch over the weekend, and the new Drupal -powered website is now live. It's got some (temporary) gaps, as content is migrated over from the old site, but it's much nicer than the previous whack-a-mole navigation we had previously. And, since it's managed by Drupal, content updates are likely to happen more often.
IT is testing the waters with the homepage migration – the site is authored/published by Drupal, but is exported as static HTML and that's what is living on our main webserver. As they get more comfortable with hosting Drupal and with performance/scalability, they'll start rolling out dynamically-driven sites rather than HTML snapshots.
Here's what the site used to look like. The arrows lined up near the bottom are the whack-a-mole faculty navigation links.
oh – and as for contributing back, I’m going to guess it’ll be a slow start. UCalgary folks are still pretty much in the getting-feet-wet stage, and already doing some pretty cool things. As the comfort level grows, I’m sure we’ll be contributing code.
In the meantime, IT’s set up a documentation/support site. It’s aimed primarily (exclusively?) at UCalgary issues, but eventually things might grow out of it to be contributed to the main documentation site.
I have been busy cheering on Lakehead University’s yaleshmale champaign. But yes, the site does look good — the navigation is much better as well; could use a bit more AJAX. It would be good if they mandated Drupal use in all departments, and all future development was done using Drupal. Is that likely to happen, I doubt it…! I wonder how the IT works at the place, as it seems rather schizophrenic in that the site does seem to change rapidly without any seemingly coherent policy guiding it – and the HCI doesn’t really seem to be managed well at times either. There are also quite a few islands of information floating around everywhere. It seems to me that both institutions and private sector corporations seem to use Drupal and contribute very little back — prove me wrong UC
! Iowa State is a good example of a university contributing back — however, in its case its actual professors which code for Drupal. In closing I would like to add, rock on Drupal, rock on!
But you are stuck working with a logo that can not have the wording above removed from the crest. So ‘University of’ starts to feel problematic. I suppose any logo starts to irritate once you work on it for a while
As for brown i am not sure but it certainly does not require anything complex. Couple XHTML files and Contribute would almost be overkill. Nice thing about XHTML/CSS is that it kinda starts to remove the *wow* of a CMS like drupal as you can have domain wide design templates like we do at UW withing the need for a central app to manage it. As long as people link to the same CSS or at least use the same ID/CLASS naming… Control of code structure is where the CMS starts to really show itself.
The static site is made using HTTrack. It’s makes a mirror of the dynamic Drupal-based site, which is then posted on the public web server.
Jesse – the XHTML itself is easy to edit, but you’re not going to unleash an admin assistant to edit it directly. Likely, some form of software will come into play (or they get to hand requests to a geek, but there’s a bottleneck).
King – HTTrack! Yeah. That’s it. Jeremy mentioned it in passing, but I forgot the exact tool Mike is using. Strange that an open source website archiver doesn’t have a MacOSX build…
The new site is quite an improvement, and big thumbs up to the work the guys over at IT are doing on it. Now its just the tedious process of migration. I’ve already started working on migrating our department’s [at the current time fairly old school] web site over to it as practice before we try to convince the departments in the faculty its time to migrate to the new look (fortunately the ones we run already all use Joomla, so its a tad easier as we can just do a Joomla template).
The Lakehead site is pretty funny and gutsy, but I would really hope that Universities would take the higher road. This campaign feels more like an American political ad, trashing the competition rather than extolling what you’re standing for…
rock on! Thanks for the tip!
Until the U of C activates RSS site-wide on its Drupal servers, there is a manual trick to embedding at least one (1) of your RSS feeds for your Drupal-created static html site at the U of C. In the administer panel, got to “blocks” and activate or configure the script block for the “custom header” placement. Enter the feed information that you would normally use to embed an RSS in a regular html document [tips on how to do this are here]. I was able to do this effectively as the site adminstrator for the Alberta Global Forum in the Faculty of Communication and Culture (http://www.ucalgary.ca/agf/).
I’m not at all an expert in php and the inner workings of CMS systems; but, if I can find an unconventional way to get around problems with these new server-side apps — even if it’s a bit messy — I will go for it.
So- No more RSS feeds huh! Doesnt that mean that google might not come around to it quite as often? Anyways its got good navigation and all around quality Good Work!!
I agree with Jason reid that this site is quite an improvement, Now its just the tedious process of migration.When I get back home I will write you again university of Calgary:)
The new site looks pretty good… but the lack of RSS feeds is kind of lame. That said, I’ve heard nothing but good about Drupal, so the migration may be a decent improvement.
D’Arcy- I really miss your subscribe to comments-
but- how would RSS work from a static site? Without the time/date based generation of data off the Database- what would tell the feed things have changed?
I agree- the navigation is much better- and a CMS beats no CMS.
not sure why RSS isn’t enabled. they must have had a reason, I’m just not privy to that. And I don’t think Google’s indexing is tied to RSS at all, so that shouldn’t affect anything. I could be wrong, of course. It happens pretty regularly…
meant to add – I’m just happy about them finally using a real CMS, and that they picked an open source one, to boot. everything else is minor stuff that will get ironed out.
So- they killed off RSS for a static site, why?
Doesn’t this mean it will be less likely to be indexed by google as often?
Thanks
movabletype is a static site. as long as it’s all published, RSS can be a static file, as can the .html files.
I took off the subscribe-to-comments (hopefully temporarily) because I think it’s been interacting badly with the spam killer modules… When spammers try to comment, email notifications still go out, which is kind of noisy.
How do you publish static sites from drupal? It would have been really cool to publish static my post that got farked recently :O)
I think David’s 1st comment re google is that if the site is static and only updated daily? weekly? then gogle, seeing that things are not updated often, will decide not to come around as much.
I guess the trick would be to find a balance of updating the site often enough so as to not disappoint when the googlebot comes knockin.
I like the new site… much better than the old one. Envious of the U of C logo though. We have only way to use ours and it drives me crazy.
…dunno why but I like http://brown.edu better
well not the browness of it…
Chris – IT’s worked up a system here. I haven’t seen the specifics, but I believe it involves creative use of
curl -Ror something similar…dalin – ah… The site is actually automatially re-published as static html once per day. So, google might actually come around more often, even if the content of the pages isn’t different – it’ll keep seeing new timestamps on the files…
Jesse – I like Brown’s new page, too. Very cool. I wonder how they generate it? I mean, could it be a custom theme page in Drupal, fronting a View? And there’s nothing wrong with Waterloo’s logo… Looks more medieval. and that’s just cool…