Drupal – content management and social networking

Drupal
For many clients seeking to implement a program-wide portal that integrates many services and content types, The Longsight Group often recommends Drupal. Drupal is a powerful and extensible framework for collating disparate resources into an attractive and manageable presentation.

Drupal has the ability to define very granular roles or permission sets that can be assigned to user accounts. This is particularly useful for providing appropriate access to content for different campus constituencies. Authoring and editing content are accomplished directly on display pages in a metaphor that makes site updates easy and when they are easy, they are completed often adding greater value (“freshness”) to your site.

Drupal is more than a content management system. The Drupal community has created many modules that add features to Drupal to meet a broad range of needs such as blogging, wikis, calendaring, online polling, photo galleries, content syndication through RSS feeds and subscriptions, online payments, event registration, proposal, abstract and manuscript submissions, and much more. These Web 2.0 tools not only make the web portal more attractive, but are well aligned with the expectations of today’s students and faculty.

Longsight has deep experience in designing and implementing Drupal as a solution for both content management and building online communities in higher education. Some of our recent projects include the New Media Consortium, Academic Commons, and a professional association portal for the National Shellfisheries Association.

Magnum Photos Launches Events Portal

As the world’s most famous photographic agency, Magnum Photos has been the benchmark of photographic excellence and innovation for over 60 years. Magnum photographers participate in a variety of cultural and educational events that promote photographic authorship and offer a unique perspective to the world around us. Because of the breadth of activities that Magnum photographers participate in, Magnum Photos is pleased to announce the official launch of the Magnum Photos Events webpage. By offering a complete schedule and listing of Magnum events across the globe, the Magnum Photos Event page is driven by the desire to reach out to the photographic community. As a dynamic site, the events page will serve as a hub of engagement for the photographic and arts community at large.

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Access To Life

In Access To Life, eight Magnum photographers document people in nine countries around the world before and four months after they began antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Here are faces, voices, and stories representing those millions of people who by now would be dead if not for access to free antiretroviral drugs. These are people who are living with HIV, working, caring for their children, and experiencing the joys and struggles of being alive.

Drupal as a Portal

Guess what? There’s a lot of content being authored for the web, and there’s no end in sight. Perhaps the oldest challenge of the modern web is how to bridge the gap between those who are creative and have content and those with the means to structure and present such content in a web browser. There are creative writers and artists with no interest in the technology and there are structured thinkers who command the technology.

To the rescue comes the nearly ubiquitous content management system (or CMS but not a course management system…that’s a different breed of application).

Content management systems are torn between two fundamental poles: one hand wishes to preserve creativity and flexibility, while the other hand aims to make things simple. These goals, more often than not, are opposed to each other. As one increases the simplicity of a CMS, the ability to tweak, move, modify, and control the result all diminish. Alternately, if one is given complete freedom inside a CMS, it begs the question: why have a CMS at all if creating content is as complex as it would be without one? It is in this light which Drupal sets itself apart from other CMS's.

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Forrester report highlights Drupal and Alfresco as top projects

A recent Forrester Research report on "Web Content Management and Open Source" highlighted Drupal and Alfresco as the top two projects to watch.

From the CNET news article quoting the Forrester report:

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Access To Life

Longsight recently helped Magnum Photos and The Global Fund launch a new Drupal-powered focus site: Access To Life.

Access to Life

Slate.com and Magnum Photos

In December 2005, the legendary documentary photography agency Magnum Photos teamed up with Slate.com to produce a daily gallery of Today's Pictures.

Single Sign-On with Drupal using CAS

Drupal CAS

Update: The CAS module is now maintained at drupal.org.

phpCAS is a fantastic library for integrating Central Authentication Services into PHP applications. The library is well-documented and is licensed under the LGPL. CAS is a Java-based single sign-on solution originally developed at Yale and later placed under the auspices of JA-SIG (Java Architectures - Special Interest Group). CAS has quickly become the most popular single sign-on solution for universities. In its most simple use (CAS can also proxy single sign-on), CAS authenticates users and sends the user to the requested application with a ticket. The application is then responsible for authenticating the ticket (behind the scenes, with a tool like cURL) and automatically logging the user in if the ticket is valid.

Using the excellent phpCAS library, we have created a small Drupal module to allow single sign-on with CAS. The latest release (0.4.20) of the phpCAS library is included in the download.

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