College Website with ready to use Alumni Portal based on Drupal

| | 5 min read
We have recently completed the development of a Drupal based College Website System. We have also successfully implemented this for one of the prestigious educational institutions in the city. Now we are ready to implement this for any other college/university who wants to have a highly scalable and flexible system at very affordable rates. If you would like us to build your school/college/university website/portal Contact Us

The project was recently done for Central Polytechnic College. Since the college wanted a dynamic system that was scalable and at the same time flexible enough to allow for future development we decided to use Drupal for the project. Most of the work involved was identifying the right modules and configuring them in the way we wanted it to work. We also had to develop a couple of modules to manage the alumni and for publishing the results.

Through this project we now have a system which we can deploy at reasonably low costs to schools, colleges and universities who would like to have a full fledged portal as their official website. We believe that a website should be able to be the public interface for the college in terms of providing facilities for students, staff, alumni, prospective students and the general public to submit, search and view information relevant to their contexts. If you represent a school/college/university and would like us to build your portal, do get in touch through the Contact page or send us an email to [email protected].

To start with we selected art4linux theme and modified it to get the look and feel that we see in the site. Then we picked and tried different modules that we felt met the need and decided with the set that we finally went ahead with. We also had to play with a lot of content that we were provided with to settle with the content that was used on the site.

In addition to providing easy to use interfaces for entering and editing data, such a system also allows the college to scale up the website in the future as per future requirements without incurring lot of additional cost. Other than the scalability factor, an enterprise portal also has great flexibility in configuration, layouts along with very strong security for any critical data.

Some of the features of the website includes:-

1) Alumni Directory - A system for the alumni to safely enter and edit their information. The system also allows for broadcasting of emails to registered alumni to communicate news about events and fund raisers in the college. The system will also allow alumni to search the database and contact other alumni through the system itself without revealing any personal details like email and phone numbers.

2) Placement Cell - The system has a basic capability to manage notifications about events like interviews through the website as well as through emails. There are also options to display placement statistics through the site.

3) Event Calendar - There is an event calendar in the system that allows users to browse and view information about events in a chronological fashion. Information about archived events will also be available through the system.

4) Publishing of documents - College will be able to upload documents like tender documents, official orders for the users to download and view

5) Information about departments - Information about departments can be entered in the system and there will be options to edit and update the information as and when needed. Information about laboratories, libraries and other facilities can be displayed through this system.

6) Faculy Information and Faculty Profiles - The system allows for publishing of faculty information including their research information, their academic and professional backgrounds through faculty profile pages.

7) Admissions & Ranklists - The system allows the publishing of ranklists during the admissions. There will be an option to directly import contents from a csv file with the required information. Candidates will be able to browse through the lists or be able to search through the lists to find their ranks and allocations.

8) Photo Galleries - The system allows publishing of photos both in public(viewable to everybody) as well as in private(viewable to registered members) galleries

We felt we should share with the rest of the drupal community the modules that we had used for this project. The following are the modules that we used for this project.

Drupal Core Modules (Optional)

Comment - Allows users to comment on and discuss published content.
Contact - Enables the use of both personal and site-wide contact forms.
Menu - Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu.
Path - Allows users to rename URLs.
Search - Enables site-wide keyword searching.
Taxonomy - Enables the categorization of content.
Upload - Allows users to upload and attach files to content.

Additional Contributed Modules (Available at drupal.org)

CAPTCHA - Base CAPTCHA module for adding challenges to arbitrary forms.
CCK - For content management. Allows administrators to define new content types.
DHTML Menus - Adds dynamic menus with DHTML to reduce page refreshes.
Event - Calendaring API, calendar display and export.
Flash node - Allows easy uploading and display of Flash content.
GMap - Filter to allow insertion of a google map into a node.
Google Analytics - Adds Google Analytics javascript tracking code to all your site's pages.
Image - Allows uploading, resizing and viewing of images.
IMCE - An image/file uploader and browser supporting personal directories and user quota.
Location - The location module allows you to associate a geographic location with content and users. Users can do proximity searches by postal code. This is useful for organizing communities that have a geographic presence.
Mime Mail - E-mail with HTML and attachments.
Panels - Create pages that are divided into areas of the page.
Pathauto - Provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage.
Search 404 - Show the results of a search based on the terms in the URL for the missing page.
Site map - Display a site map.
TinyMCE - The most popular WYSIWYG editor for advanced content editing.
Token - Provides a shared API for replacement of textual placeholders with actual data.
Video Filter - Filter to include videos from sites like Youtube, Godtube etc.
Views - The views module creates customized views of node lists.

Modules Created by Zyxware

Alumni Management - Manages alumni registration, editing, listing and searching
Publish Results - Import data from spreadsheet and provide searchable interface where students can search for their results.