Theming and going Mobile: drupal@upei

The University of Prince Edward Island is a public university located in Charlottetown, PEI on the east coast of Canada. This project is the second phase of our build of Drupal at the university. In it we are hoping to use our theming layer to provide context for clients who may be lost around our various multisite installations. We are also considering how to effectively repurpose the content that we are creating on our main website to make an interesting and effective mobile site.

We've been using Drupal full-time at the university for two years now and it has actually shrunk to 'only' a 100 database multisite installation. All development, maintenance, design and conceptual/marketing consultation are done by our little shop of three at Integrated Communications. Our clients on campus are responsible for the content on their own sites. The project's lead is Dave Cormier, our lead Drupal developer is Yuxing Huang, and our all 'round client services/Drupal guy is Shawn Arsenault.

Introduction

The upei.ca that the world sees is (mostly) copied from our Drupal server to our externally accessible server using httrack – which gives us a static copy of Drupal to serve out to the world and added security. We proxy through any of the content (say comments on a blog) that needs to be accessing database content. Our theme grew out of the excellent NewsFlash theme by RoopleTheme (Thanks, Bill) and has now become fully custom coded. We have a few custom modules, some for theming and some for integrating with XML exported from our UIS, but for the most part we are using core and standard contrib modules combined with template files and some increasingly nifty CSS to get our work done.

There are a number of significant challenges to running a site of this size for an institution that has many different departments, services, and information that need to reach a varied clientele. The biggest is simply allowing people to make informed decisions before they click on a link. We wanted to offer some contextual information with each major link to tell people a little bit about where they are going. This both offers some context for the information that will follow as well as allowing people to make better clicking choices overall.