Drupal

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Definition

Drupal is a popular portalware of the C3MS or CMS variety. It is used to build all sorts of educational websites, including teaching platforms. Similar systems discussed in this Wiki are Joomla and PostNuke.

Purpose and features

According to the About Drupal page (retrieved 18:36, 11 May 2007 (MEST)) “Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including Community web portals, Discussion sites, Corporate web sites, Intranet applications, Personal web sites or blogs, Aficionado sites, E-commerce applications, Resource directories, Social Networking sites.”

Features

The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

... and much more.

Software architecture

  • Drupal runs on any typical LAMP, WAMP or MAMP configuration.
  • Content in Drupal is created in individual "nodes". For nodes of type "story", users can add comments to the node (comments themselves are not considered nodes). Depending on site settings, adding new nodes and/or posting comments might or might not be allowed. Also, nodes or comments might require approval from the moderators before the node or comment is displayed. (Drupal terminology, retrieved 18:36, 11 May 2007 (MEST))

Drupal's basic set of note types include ([1]):

Blog Entry
  • Drupal blogs have typical functionality of blogware
Book Page
  • Book pages are designed to be part of a collaborative book. An example of a collaborative book is the Drupal developer documentation. All node types can be part of a book.
Comment
  • Comments actually aren't nodes, they are their own special content type. Comments are what allow people to add comments to any other node that has been created.
Forum
  • Forums are sets of nodes and their comments. These are grouped together as belonging in one forum by assigning them the forum name, which is a taxonomy term. These forum names can be grouped in forum containers, which are other terms, of which they are children in a hierarchical vocabulary which is called "forums", and configured as only applicable to nodes of the "forum" type.
Page
  • Pages are simple nodes, typically used for static content that can (but are not required to) be linked into the main navigation bar
Poll
  • A poll is where a multiple choice question is asked and users can answer and see other peoples answers to questions.
Story
  • Story pages are news engine entries. Stories are generally used for information which is only relevant for a period of time (eg. news stories) and is expected to expire off of the page.

Many other node types are included by [ contributed modules].

In education

Websites for educators and researchers

Drupal is very popular in education (all levels) to build community web sites within which members can post news, share resources or collaborate in other ways. Examples:

There are dozens more ...

Teaching platforms

While Drupal as platform for education-related websites doesn't come as a surprise, using Drupal instead of a learning management system is a more interesting topic. We believe that drupal is good platform to implement project-oriented learning designs. Typically, a teacher (and not the institution) will run the platform. It's something that Daniel K. Schneider advocated in his C3MS project-based learning model (implemented a few years ago with PostNuke).

Examples:

  • Archive of Welcome to English 420S (Distance Learning), Purdue University
  • Maxetom Integrates educational on-line multimedia applications. “Maxetom propose aux enfants des coloriages en ligne qui leur feront découvrir les couleurs en espagnol ou en anglais.”

Typically, a teacher (or an organization) will design a custom environment to support various kinds of learning activities. One way to think about this, was presented in 2004 in the TECFA SEED Catalog. There is also a TECFA SEED Catalog version in this wiki and that will be updated a bit in some nearer future - Daniel K. Schneider 11:10, 1 June 2007 (MEST).

Links and resource management

Example:

Installation

Prerequisites

  • Drupal should install without problems on a LAMP or WAMP system. So install Apache/MySQL/Php first. In case you just want to play, I recommend WOS, a free WAMP distribution that runs on a memory stick and that includes a Drupal (optional module) !

Drupal is open-source software distributed under the GPL ("General Public License") and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Standard Drupal

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer. However, a typical educator probably would like to download and install third-party modules.


DrupalEd

A group of people (including Bill Fitzgerald) released an educational package (not tested yet).

“DrupalEd is a powerful open source content management system with the power to support the e-learning needs of large educational institutions. It is also easy enough to install and use for individual teachers/professors to implement in their own classes (for teachers who would like to abandon BlackBoard, sans IT Department backing)” ([2]).

Other extensions of interest to education

Getting started with drupal 7.27

Before the instalation

Moving Drupal to its intended location

If you are working locally using a Wamp systeme extract the zip file and copy-past it into the “www.directory”. If you are using a web server (e.g Tecfa server) follow the same procedure and copy-paste the extracted file in the directory that will host your future site.

Create a database and user using phpMyAdmin

Local machine: If you don’t know how to create a user and a database using phpMyAdmin see the example wordpress/create a database http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Wordpress_installation_and_configuration Web server: According to the drupals’ community documentation “Most web hosting accounts provide a Web-based control panel to help you administer your site. These tools include easy-to-use features for creating a new database, and for creating a "user" with rights to the database. To create a database using a browser-based control panel consult the documentation or ask your web host service provider.” Either you use a local machine or a web server it is important to take note of the username, password, database name and hostname while you are creating the database as you will enter these items into fields in your browser when running the install script. https://drupal.org/documentation/install/create-database

Run the installation script:=

Insert to base URL (the directory where you placed your Drupal files).If you are using a system like WAMP the URL is http://localhost/drupal. Or if you renamed the extracted folder to drupalTest for example the URL is http://localhost/drupalTest. If you have installed drupal in a web host insert the domain name. if you are using the TECFA server insert the URL http://www.tecfaetu.unige.ch/. If you have installed Drupal in a subfolder that is called projects point your browser to the folder, for example http://www.tecfaetu.unige.ch/projects.

Installation process

Note: Be very careful when clicking save and continue. There is no back button.

  1. Select the Standard profile as shown in the picture and click save and continue. The minimal profile is targeted toward more experienced Drupal site creators.
  2. The default language of the interface is English, if you want to install using a language other than the default English, click the Learn how to install Drupal in other languages link.
  3. Select the database type and enter the database name and the database username that you created at the second step. According to Drupal community The Advanced options allow you to change the database host in case that you are using a web server, the port if you are using a non-standard port number and the table prefix if you are installing multiple instances of Drupal tables that share the same database. https://drupal.org/documentation/install/run-script
  4. Click save and continue
  5. The following progress bare will appear; wait for the installer to finish the installations.
  6. Input the information for the first user accound. Note that all the following information can be changed later through the configuration panel.
  • Site information: Enter the name of your site and the site e-mail address
  • Site maintenance account: Enter the username and the password of the first user.
  • Server settings: We can change the Default country and the Default time zone. Also you can uncheck the boxes in the Update notifications field if you don’t want to receive notifications for required updates.
  1. Click save and continue

Your new site is ready. Click visit your new site

Links

Drupal

Official
Reviews and analysis on the Drupal website
Drupal Themes
Other

References

  • Albion, Peter (2005) 'Designing for an online doctoral studies community using an open source platform.' In: Crawford, C. and Carlsen, R. and Gibson, I. and McFerrin, K. and Price, J. and Weber, R. and Willis, D. A., (ed.). Proceedings of the 16th International Conference of the Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, pp. 2138-2143. Abstract/HTML/PDF
  • Schneider Daniel; Mourad Chakroun, Pierre Dillenbourg, Catherine Frété, Fabien Girardin, Stéphane Morand, Olivier Morel and Paraskevi Synteta, (2004) TECFA Seed Catalog, unpublished, PDF
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