DCT (new site) is poking Drupal with a stick, especially in terms of multiple sites, and has a few up and running (go check out the post for those).
He concludes that there’s a long way to go:
“It’s pretty clear to me that a Drupal site per class is not a particularly good model for the long term. These are experiments and are seeding ideas with faculty. Personally, I think that a Drupal site per learning community might be an interesting approach, or perhaps each of our peer groups should get one. For now, I am happy to see the ideas begging to soak in and the expectations begin to rise in terms of what we should expect from an online content system.”
Thanks to Charlie I’ve come to pretty much the same process as David with creating multiple sites, and it is a little unwieldy, but I’m enjoying it a lot. Unlike David though I think that there are possibilities for a ‘Drupal site per class’ but a couple of things I would like to see is:
-A centralised Drupal ‘spawning’ site which holds individual user data even though they may be members of several sites (a bit like blogger)
-The capacity to develop simple, authenticated, groups in Drupal (mini duplicated Drupal sites) recreated below a master Drupal site for small group work… this is still something that the major CMSs have over us.
Thanks for sharing David, this feels like it’s got potential!
Courtesy to the multi-site configuration patch, there will be an easy way to create multiple sites in Drupal 4.6.
Centralized user data: either share a user data table, or use the SXIP module for global sign-ins.
authenticated groups: depending on the size of the group, a separate site still might be best (if setting up additional sites is easy and fast, there is no reason not to).
Being able to “clone” an existing setup (configuration, modules, permissions, etc.) is something that increases speed. This is already possible, and will be made easier with the introduction of install profiles.
Has Will Pate contacted you yet? He’s looking to focus only on Drupal for educational users.
If any educational institutions have some free development resources, a Drupal module or three would be the perfect project for computer science students to sink their teeth into. Send them directly over to Drupal.org or contact me if you need help getting them organized.