Spreading The Love: Utilizing 2 Drupal Distributions To Achieve Efficiency

Posted Mar 16, 2011 // 1 comments

Recently, we had the opportunity to work with PBS NewsHour Extra to build an interactive learning collaboration experience online. It needed to be intuitive for audiences from students through seasoned professionals, and the infrastructure had to include a vast suite of engagement-style features related to sharing and learning.

Not surprisingly, the timeline was tight and there were some fairly lofty goals. And we knew that Drupal could provide both enterprise-level capabilities for growth over the long-termand the right mix of tools to help jump start the project. Since we were given the opportunity to do the design, and the PBS brand was going to be really fun to work with, we wanted to minimize the amount of custom development needed so that we could focus on all areas of the project while conserving budget.

But *how* we were going to build to meet their various organizational, technology, and user goals -- and within an aggressive schedule -- didn’t crystallize until we realized (thankfully, in the early stages) that we could utilize both Phase2’s OpenPublish Drupal distribution & another open-source Drupal distribution, Open Atrium.

And with that, we were off! 

By making use of both of these distributions, we delivered upon early launch requirements (ahead of schedule & within budget!) while laying the foundation to capitalize on future extensions as-needed.

And here’s how: 

1.  We used OpenPublish to power the public-facing website that caters to those aforementioned audiences. In fact, we built OpenPublish specifically for people who need to publish refreshing, up-to-date content on a regular basis and -- on the public side -- encourage dissemination of that content into  their users’ networks. So this was a no-brainer as one of the integral distributions we should use. Plus, it supports multi-site management; visual branding (to meet various marketing expectations); and a whole slew of content types -- like rich media (videos, podcasts, etc.) or more traditional social media integration (posting to Twitter, “Liking” something via Facebook, etc.). 
2.  We used Open Atrium to power the dynamic portal, which the audiences see if they log in after going through a simple sign-up process. The Open Atrium distribution is intuitive for just about anyone. It can be fully customized and extended to accommodate more robust needs, but it comes standard with a blog, wiki, calendar, to-do lists, a shoutbox (sort of like Twitter, it enables users to send short messages), and a beautiful dashboard so users can manage all their communications in a sleek, personalized way. Plus, Open Atrium is still being fully supported and new releases continue to extend its already robust features, so it was a perfect complement to OpenPublish.

So if you’re up against the competing challenges of quick timelines and high expectations of robust functionality for administrators, public audiences, and adopted users, then consider integrating OpenPublish and Open Atrium. It’s been a happy marriage for us!