Education
University of Washington at Tacoma adopts Drupal
If you look at the source of University of Washington at Tacoma's new site, you'll immediately notice it's running Drupal. What's not immediately apparent, however, is the path they took to get it in place.
I recently got an e-mail from a member of the UW Tacoma web team, who explained that they migrated to Drupal from a home-grown system running on IIS and mostly based in ColdFusion. Their system often required manual editing of HTML for even the simplest of content updates, and synchronizing between development and live versions of the site was (as we all know) an ever present problem.
Sounds familiar? I've heard this story so many times.
The team looked into a Joomla based solution, as well as one based on Plone, but eventually gravitated toward Drupal due in large part to the helpful Drupal community. As I've always maintained, our software rocks, but our community is what continues to make Drupal a success.
The e-mail concluded with a great quote that I hope James Woods, its author, won't mind me including here: "Once I learned how to stop fighting Drupal and embrace the automagical function naming hooks, I've come to love Drupal.". I think that quote probably describes the experience of many, many Drupal developers.
Way to go, James, and congratulations to you and the rest of your team for a great looking site.
Drupal goes to Mars
Drupal goes to Mars, or rather, Drupal helps us go to Mars ... eventually. NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University is doing a lot of advanced work with Drupal. They have a number of Drupal sites, each with a different purpose, but all used to share information about Mars as discovered by ASU's THEMIS camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. All of the sites have some interesting integrations with other software, including LDAP, legacy authentication systems, Java Servlet based web services, Flash, Java desktop clients, map servers or Google Earth.
Their main portal, http://themis.asu.edu, features news, images and articles about THEMIS and the Odyssey mission. Another Drupal site, http://viewer.mars.asu.edu offers a search portal for millions of images and data from eight instruments on Mars orbiters. It uses Drupal and jQuery as the interface to a Java Servlet backend database and integrates "Deep Zoom" style image viewers.
Ever wanted to help explore Mars? No problem, http://suggest.mars.asu.edu is for you. On this Drupal site you can suggest places on Mars for scientists to photograph with the THEMIS camera aboard Mars Odyssey. The site shows you where Odyssey will be orbiting in the next week, and it integrates with Google Earth's desktop application and the Google Earth browser plugin to let you zoom around mars and choose a place to suggest. After it made the suggested photographs, it will send you an e-mail with a link, where you might be the first human to see that particular spot on mars in such detail. If that makes your inner geek jump up and down, make sure to read their technical write-up. Cool stuff!
Portland State University using Drupal
We're on a roll with universities using Drupal! Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, is using Drupal for their main website at http://pdx.edu.
Strayer using Drupal
Strayer University, with more than 44,000 students enrolled at over 70 campuses, is using Drupal on http://strayer.edu.
Duke using Drupal
Earlier this afternoon, I blogged about Stanford using Drupal. Well, if Stanford isn't enough for you, check out the main page for Duke University, recently redesigned using Drupal.
Most universities have had dozens of Drupal sites at the departmental level for some time now, but now it seems like Drupal is starting to graduate from the departmental level to the main site. Last week, I already blogged about how Rutgers University started using Drupal for their main site. More evidence that Drupal is starting to become a serious contender in the enterprise, and that more and more organizations are starting to standardize on Drupal.
It is great to see corporations, universities and governments endorse and adopt Drupal on a global scale!
Stanford using Drupal
I've been around the web long enough to know a good-looking site when I see one -- http://shc.stanford.edu is a good looking site. It is the home page of the Stanford Humanities Center, and it uses Drupal.
And there is more. A quick glance at https://techcommons.stanford.edu/topics/drupal/sites-using-drupal-stanford reveals a list of over fifty Drupal sites currently active at Stanford. As far as I saw on the ones I clicked on, each site is different.
This trend isn't specific to Stanford. We see it at MIT, Harvard and many other universities. More and more universities start to embrace Drupal. At many of those, Drupal is slowly becoming the de facto platform for web development. It is an emerging trend, and one that introduces a lot of students to Drupal.
Rutgers using Drupal
