In 2007, the Multimedia Program website had been languishing on an old half-implementation of Drupal, just like the Slane College site when I first arrived. We needed to get a new design up that would very easily managed by non-technical staff, yet where we could still show off the projects that we perform in our classes so that students would get an accurate idea of what a Multimedia major does. (The Slane College has our Multimedia Major and also Communication's Electronic Media major, which is more focused on radio and television broadcasting.)

Tough Requirements 

The entire site was designed to be used with the popular blogging tool Ecto so that students and staff could easily update the content without logging on to the site. The requirement to use Ecto for the majority of the pages presented some design challenges in respect to the Drupal platform that the site was implemented on. Ecto is essentially a blogging tool, which means that it knows about taxonomy and can post nodes of any type, but it is missing interaction with two critical Drupal sytems: the menu system, and CCK. You can't put something in a particular menu through Ecto, nor can you use content types that have any CCK fields.

As a result, some of the sections required unique approaches. Wherease I could have liked to make the course pages with CCK so that you could upload one or more images, videos, or links and have them pop up, I instead wrote a custom Drupal input filter which allowed students to write a simple syntax for pop-up project examples: [popup src="mm213.swf" width="800" height="600"]. The popup code would take of presenting the linked media, whether it was a QuickTime movie, an external website, or a Flash example.

Students Pitch In 

Students in the MM 413 class wrote content, took photos, and helped implement the theme. The students came up with some very creative photographic concepts for the masthead, which adds a lot as you navigate through faculty and courses. The site is hooked up the Bradley University's LDAP server, allowing students and staff to log in without having to remember another username and password. Students can create their own profiles, which are aggregated on the site. Yahoo! Pipes aggregate recent student posts to social networks based on what they put in their profiles.

Finally, as a testament to the site's original goals, the site is still regularly updated with Ecto by non-technical staff.