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.

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.

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

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.

Longsight built the Academic Commons using the Drupal content management system. Longsight added an editorial workflow system, new content types, and a group system that provides ad-hoc, web-backed email lists.

Introducing  Academic Commons

Academic Commons offers a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Academic Commons publishes essays, reviews, interviews, showcases of innovative uses of technology, and vignettes that critically examine technology uses in the classroom. Academic Commons aims to share knowledge, develop collaborations, and evaluate and disseminate digital tools and innovative practices for teaching and learning with technology. We want this site to advance opportunities for collaborative design, open development, and rigorous peer critique of such resources.