audibleCode

Here come another drupal success story. The building of St. Louis Jubilee School. This is a primary and JSS school (Junior High School) in Kumasi. Kumasi is a city in Ghana(West-Africa). The site is a basic website with normal functionality. The website contains information about the school and the activities of the school. Some of the features that allow the website to stand out from the rest of it’s kind is the following:
1. Online Results System
2. User and email Account for the staff
3. Accounts for the Students
4. Events/ News and Articles organization
5. Galleries
I just want to go through how I built the website. This is a write or some sort of documentation about how the tools,modules and how the site was built. We all know that drupal is a very powerful tool. I even called it the “drupal framework”. I see it as more of a framework that a CMS. We usually see it being used for high end sites like New York Observer, Eureka and the rest. I must say that they are really performing a awesome job with those site. I have actually learnt a lot from these sites and how the developers built it. In this case drupal is being used for a lower end site in terms of functionality , if I may say so. (A high school web site/CMS)

Data Objects
The site centers aroung a number of data objects.The information and the data on the website was modelled or divided into the following.
• News items
These are stories and news items as well as articles about the school. This feature gives the site the ability to display news items on the site and affords the ability for the administrator to update news.
• Events
These are upcoming or out dated events that have taken place in the school or has any connection with the affairs of the school.
• Static Content
These are the various information about the site that are not updates as often as other content of the site. Examples of these pages are the about page, the contact page, the sitemap and all content that is not updated regularly.
• Student

This is information or an abstract concept of a student on the site. This is the information that is used to reference the students results and the various information on the site.

• Teachers
The teacher data object is an abstract concept of a teacher with all the vital information about the teacher to be displayed on the website for informational purposes.

The data objects above were all converted into content types with the exception of the teacher and student data objects. CCK was used to create all these content types. Let me just highlight the main CCK field types that were used.

The CCK Date Field.
This was what was used with events data object to create the events content type. The Date was used to tell when the event will occur and was also used as a filter when creating the the event_views. The event_view is used display all upcoming events on the site. The events that have already occurred are still in the system but the are not displayed until a search relating to the content is performed.

The events content type also contains a field called the description field. It is use to describe the event or jus brief information about the event that is coming up.

User Reference Module
The user reference module was used for referencing a particular result type to a particular user. In this case a student. This is what happens; the admin login and creates a result slip (the content type for the result data object), he then selects a user using the user reference module. The user reference module only selects “students”.

I created roles for the STUDENT, TEACHER, and SITEADMINSRTATOR. These are the roles that the user reference module uses.

The rest of the content types are all basic drupal content types no serious modifications. It is your basic CCK text field being used normally.

The Teaser Module
The teaser module is user for a custom teaser for the news item. I customized the teaser module to display when the content type is a newsitem. The original thing displays for all content types how ever I need to make it display for only the news content type.

Theming
I got a normal html theme and converted it into a drupal theme. I had to use green because of the school colors. You can get some of these free html template from
http://opendesigns.org

Challenges
In fact I was really confident that I could do this site in drupal. This was so partly because the requirements of the site was not that exhausting. I have been working extensively with drupal for about a year and half. I was really interested after I realised the power that is yield, this was when I finished reading the drupal book “Drupal Pro development ” in drupal.
I also gained immense knowledge from the drupla dojo videos. They have really done a good job. Drupal is truly going places.
The only real challenge that I can think of is the fact that drupal’ clean url feature. The hosting server did not support this feature no I could not use the pathauto nor the clean url modules.

School websites and Drupal
I personally believe that drupal has all that it takes and for to serious improve the quality and functionality of school website. Ranging from universities to kindergarten websites
From the calendar module,CCK,news,quiz module and the hundred of modules available, these can and should all be used for making school website.

Just to share a thought. Shouldn’t drupal be used as one of the case studies web we are studying web development in our universities. The framework is a true work of art.

Contact
Okay, I am Kwadwo A Boateng, I maintain the blog http://www.audiblecode.wordpress.com and my email address is boating.kwadwo@gmail.com