One of the things we wanted to accomplish with the Joomla upgrade for student orgs was to allow for more and easier customization of their sites. We jump started this with a default set of 60+ themes, some commercial, some free that gave organizations a large base to work from. It’s been interesting to watch the paths students have been going down, and it looks like we have achieved some level of what we were looking for. I certainly see many more sites that have adopted different themes when compared to the initial Mambo roll out. Some of this may just be 3 years of “Internet time” whereby we have a student base that is more savvy in the use of these tools, but I like to hope that some of it is due to our efforts. Here’s a sampling of some sites that have gone beyond the basics:
Korean American Student Association
Carolina Association of Pharmacy Students
With student coming back next week, we will be scheduling group training sessions again to get people comfortable with the basics of managing their site. I hope to create some podcasts of these instructions as well. As usual, it comes down to time.
Just finished the Word Press 2.7 upgrade and realized I haven’t posted in quite some time. Maybe it’s my twitter addiction that is keeping me from posting. It may be those microblog tweets are sapping my capability to put together a coherent post. I have friends with similar experiences (although Paul seems to have recovered and is blogging full steam again). Anyway, let me ramble on for a bit and see what come of it.
Since my last post, we went live with the new slice.unc.edu and the associated student organization sites. From a technical standpoint, one of the most interesting bits is our integration of Shibboleth into Joomla. Accomplished via the excellent work of Sam Moffatt and some internal folks here at UNC who helped get the Apache – Shibboleth config right we now have single sign on across all student org sites. We’ve been working this into other sites with the Division of Student Affairs as well and I think it will have a very nice positive impact for lots of our user community. Our adoption rates look pretty good so far and when the students get back in January we’ll kick off a series of training sessions to help further adoption and give people some help where we can. We certainly can’t satisfy every desire of the 600+ organizations involved, but I do think we have put up a solid and reliable platform that is quite powerful and will help to increase visibility and communication for our active student orgs.
I presented on this implementation at UNC CAUSE and had a lot of interest from those able to stay awake during my presentation. I think one of the more rewarding aspects is we have been able to sustain a relationship with student government for several years now. I’ve also seen technology and slice and student orgs in particular, make their way into student body president candidate platforms. I like to hope that represents a positive development and a desire to keep the relationship alive as administrations come and go. I certainly value the input I get from students and try to return the favor by delivering services they can use with a minimal amount of effort.
Tags: student orgs
For the past few years we have provided Mambo based sites for the over 600 recognized student organizations at UNC Chapel Hill. In a month or so we will migrate to Joomla and convert existing sites on a by-request basis. Managing these sites hasn’t really turned out to be that much of an issue, although we do struggle with the scale sometimes. To support the new sites, we’re moving the file storage to XSAN and the hosting to XServe, which certainly ups the technical complexity a bit. We will also be hosting the PHP portion of Joomla ourselves, instead of using the central IT group’s web servers. There are several reasons behind the change, but they are primarily technical and it just makes things simpler for us to run some in-house developed site management tools on our own hardware.
The same server will also be hosting the Carolina Wiki, a student-run information site. This comes from our continued partnership and working relationship with student government and is going to be a first for this campus and probably one of the few officially sanctioned student driven Wikis at a major University. There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions with this initiative, but we are committed to seeing how it works and to sorting out the issues as they arise.
Should be an interesting next couple of months.
Tags: student orgs
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