Comments on: University of Calgary’s Website Now Powered by Drupal

By: Online college reviews

Online college reviews — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:40:36 +0000

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.

By: steven davies

steven davies — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:46:39 +0000

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:)

By: Sara Latvanen

Sara Latvanen — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:43:36 +0000

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!!

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Sami Khan

Sami Khan — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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!

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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…

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

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.