Happy Birthday from Chennai, India!

I am so excited Drupal turn's 8 Today. Happy Birthday!



You can do so much with Drupal.
I love Drupal :)

I am in love with open source again

It's awesome the way people collaborate and share their views and ideas in Open source. Every one from totally different backgrounds with only Drupal as their commonality are discussing at Drupal redesign iteration 9: http://groups.drupal.org/node/17106

http://drupal.markboultondesign.com/iteration10/homepage_notloggedin.html.

The best part of the discussion is everyone out there actually gets to read and evaluate others perspective without prejudice! To have such discussions in a real time environment with people face to face, having each one to listen to the other would be such a challenge. It's so beautiful to just watch this happen, let alone be a part of it. I just love the way we can collaborate online, I love Open source :)!

Drupal in Education:

There is a need for Schools and Colleges to have a Dynamic website. This can be very easily achieved using some basic modules in Drupal

A broad list of features any educational institute would require and their associated modules / Drupal configuration.

I) Roles: ( Define using Drupal’s core access control functionality)
1. Admin
2. Teacher
3. Student
4. Visitor

II) Various Content and Content Categories - use Taxonomy to define the categories and CCK for different types of content
1. Announcements – Just another content type
2. Marketing content: - Static content
About us
Contact us
Feedback, etc.

III) Galleries – I love brilliant gallery and the effect that goes with it.

IV) Video – use video CCK with FFMpeg conversion tool, size of videos is always a problem and costs bandwidth as well. So using FFmpeg, we can configure the videos to get optimized as flash files.

V) Features for Registered users (parents/teachers/students)

1. Student id creation (bulk upload) og,
2. Class wise Home work (upload) – CCK and og
3. Class wise Events (online event registration) og - event module
4. Contact teachers – contact us page
5. Personalized Dashboards – Use views

References:

CCK:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/cck
http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views:
http://drupal.org/node/109604
http://drupal.org/project/views
Taxonomy:
http://drupal.org/node/299

Video and FFMpeg modules:
http://drupal.org/project/flashvideo
http://drupal.org/project/video_cck
http://drupal.org/project/emfield
Gallery:
http://drupal.org/project/brilliant_gallery
http://drupal.org/project/gallery
Organic Groups:
http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/og
http://drupal.org/project/og
Other useful modules:
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
http://drupal.org/project/front

Some interesting articles and podcasts:

1. Using Drupal in Education, Training, and (Some) Next Steps
At: http://www.funnymonkey.com/book-training-next-steps
You can also download DrupalEd, a pre configured Drupal installation for Educational institutions.

2. Jeff Robbins talks to Bill Fitzgerald of FunnyMonkey about how Drupal is being used in universities, high schools, and other educational institutions at
http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-66-bill-fitzgerald-education

Groups to follow:
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education

Multisite vs OG concept

Organic Groups module

Enable users to create and manage their own 'groups'. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves. They do so by posting the usual node types: blog, story, page, etc. A block is shown on the group home page which facilitates these posts. The block also provides summary information about the group.

Multisite installation in drupal

Multi-site is a very powerful feature in large sites or hosting operations but is often mis-understood. Multi-site is designed as a way to share the same code base for multiple different Drupal based sites. These sites are separate and do not share content or administration. Multi-site just helps with managing the code base, shared themes and modules.

A single Drupal installation can host several Drupal-powered sites, each with its own individual configuration.

Comparison of OG and a Multi site configuration for some parameters:

Speed and Performance of individual sites
Multisite: Very good
OG: Need to cache queries to improve performance

Size of database
Multisite: No of tables in the Database incremental by the number of site specific tables. (Drupal allows for some tables to be shared across sites, hlep us configure common functionality if any.)
OG: Incremental only by an entry in the node table for each of the of content created,and an entry in the group – node access mapping table.

Managing change
Multisite:Changes in database has to be done across each of the site specific tables - This will be a challenge
OG: Easier to manage change, as all tables are shared.

The concept of OG is good for inter-related sites, when there are a lot of common functionalities across these sites.The decision of Multisite vs OG has to be based on the no of multisites that need to be created and the functionlaities across these sites.

No of sites using OG:

http://teamsugar.com
http://www.mailfriends.com
http://www.fastcompany.com
http://groups.drupal.og

Chennai meet Nov 2008

Checkout the happenings at http://groups.drupal.org/node/16429. New members: Marco, Thany and Krishnakumar, bring in more energy!