[Drupal] Open Academy

[Jason Little]

Anyone who hasn't watched the DrupalCon OpenAcademy presentation probably should, particularly if you don't have your D7 plan in place yet.
http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/open-academy-higher-education-drupal-product-departmental-websites

Basically, Berkeley, Chapter Three, and Pantheon partnered together to solve department sites in a near optimal fashion.  Here's the cliff notes.

Working with universities, Chapter Three built an awesome Drupal distribution (OpenAcademy) on top of Panopoly (a panels based starter distribution).  Open Academy has core extensions for news, events, courses, faculty, and publications.  From the demo, they had a near perfect panels implementation which gives editors enormous control over their sites.

Pantheon provides expert Drupal hosting as a preferred vendor for the university with standardized pricing.  So they get all those niceties we struggle to get or provide when we roll our own hosting (Easy Install Distributions, Easy Updates, Dev/Staging/Prod, Solr, APC, Memcache, Varnish, etc)

OpenAcademy uses the "apps" model.  This allows non-technical site owners to install new applications at the click of a button.  From a user perspective, it works a bit like the android/apple app stores (except everything is free).  Chapter Three runs their own app store for OpenAcademy as does Berkeley.  Since vanilla OpenAcademy doesn't include school specific functionality (peoplesoft/OSUPro/RiV/Shibboleth/etc), the Berkeley App Store is key for providing school specific functionality.

(On the technical side, writing an App is like making a features module feature.  The key difference is that it has, by convention, a centralized/simplified user centric configuration and often sample content.)

http://drupal.org/project/openacademy (requires solr extensions)
http://drupal.org/project/panopoly

http://denver2012.drupal.org/program/sessions/building-drupal-apps-distributions (Building Apps for Distributions)

Best,
Jason Little
College of Engineering

Need help?  Submit a ticket online.
https://engineering.osu.edu/help

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