Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!

Jun 08 2016

This is the first in a series of posts recapping ImageX’s presentations at this year’s DrupalCon.

Roaming Alone

When Trinity University faculty members took the initiative to build and maintain their own individual websites for each of their areas of expertise, they were bringing the classroom to their students in an accessible way. However, when these sites were designed and built, often by third parties, they took on an individual look and feel that was disconnected from both the Trinity University brand and the school’s own website. Despite the great content that their faculty was sharing, the school’s website wasn’t receiving any traffic as a result and, more importantly, students weren’t able to search for or access information from elsewhere in the school from each faculty member’s site. Trinity University identified the opportunity to help their faculty launch their own websites easily and quickly that were on brand, accessible from throughout the school’s web presence, and that better served the needs of their students by better organizing and containing the information they needed. But how could Trinity University, and higher education institutions in general, solve the challenge of giving their faculty enough freedom to build something unique that wasn’t an out-of-the-box product? The solution was to engage ImageX and leverage OpenEDU.

Trinity University and ImageX

Trinity University underwent a thorough discovery process, building internal support for the project, communicating the need for it up their chain of command, getting buy-in from the necessary stakeholders, and having broad and comprehensive requirements gathering sessions. They consulted with faculty, staff, and students to understand how any potential solution might be used, and what features should be included to maximize adoption. And following that discovery period, they engaged potential vendors to assess their capabilities and proposed solutions. And in the end, they partnered with ImageX Media, who are known for their successes in the Drupal and higher education communities.

Herding Tigers

The solution that ImageX proposed was a new website, which was to be made available at faculty.trinity.edu. It leveraged the school’s existing main website, code base, and Drupal installation as well as ImageX’s knowledge and prebuilt Drupal components to meet the needs of the project’s various stakeholders. Faculty are able to visit the new website and submit a request to build a new website for themselves. Once the request is approved, they are given access to a self-serve content management system that empowers them to design, build, and launch a personal website that they customize to their needs from a repository of approved design modules and prebuilt functional components. Some of the highlighted functionality includes:

Panelizer is a drag-and-drop design tool that lays out the website’s pages;
Well-structured content types and out-of-the-box views, based on the OpenEDU installation profile;
Automatic creation of microsites from a single content type;
Organic groups, which allow administrators to facilitate and add membership to assigned own-group users and contributors;
Custom styles for individual websites, selectable through an improved WYSIWYG interface made possible by the Paragraphs module, that maintains Trinity University’s global branding; and,
Single sign-on using existing Trinity University accounts through LDAP.

And because Trinity University is already using Drupal for their main website and microsites, they were able to provide ImageX with their theme files so that they could be extended to fit the requirements for the faculty website templates. Individual user themes are based on a robust central theme, with subthemes extending the scripting for the base theme, and users have the freedom to create unique layouts without scripting. Customizable and responsive themes that are based on a flexible template were designed and built using Drupal on the .edu domain. Design options available to users include:

Pre-defined font selections;
Pre-defined colour palettes including backgrounds, panel colours, and accent colours;
Header, footer, and page layouts;
Research posts and listings;
Blog posts, tags, categories, and listings;
Google analytics for the site owner and the university; and,
University brand media assets through the integration of our online repository, WebDam.

In order to satisfy a variety of personal tastes, colour palettes that could express cool and warm tones, along with a selection of accent colours to reflect variety, distinction, and personality were chosen. And for those who just love Trinity University, their brand colours were available for use too. Because #TigerPride.

#TigerPride and OpenEDU

Jeanna Balreira, Creative Director at Trinity University had this to say about the initiative: “As faculty are adopting their new site templates, they’re finding it easier than ever to build sites, keep them updated, and discover new ways to showcase their content to the world. We are able to then turn around and leverage their content through searches on the Trinity.edu domain, and position them as the University’s thought leaders within the broader academic community. "Inspired by ImageX’s work with institutions of higher education around North America, we approached the team with our initial problem, and they 'got it' right away. Utilizing OpenEDU, we’ve been able to give faculty just enough control over their site and its content, but not enough to run wild or roam alone. What does the future have in store for our other Tiger web editors? Well, we’re excited to soon extend the platform to other user groups on campus: student organizations, alumni chapters, and lab groups -- to name a few.”