announcing trekk: drupal for the university, evolved
DESCRIPTION
Drupal Connect announces a Drupal distribution for higher education institutions, targeting advanced migration and complex content distribution workflows. Trekk is an exciting new Drupal 7 Distribution designed to meet common University pain points unaddressed by existing solutions. Trekk has 3 major benefits: 1. Sharing content across sites—many of our clients have needed to share courses, faculty bios, news, etc between multiple department or school sites. Trekk allows you to add that professor bio to the upcoming symposium or cross-list a certificate course without duplication of efforts or the burden of maintaining multiple content versions. We’ve designed Trekk to be flexible and robust, you can share content in Drupal-friendly format so client sites can use Views, Panels, Display Suite and all of the other tools your team is familiar with OR you can share raw data as JSON for ultimate flexibility. Best of all, it’s easy to keep things in sync—the data flow is one-way, so there’s no confusion about where changes occurred AND client sites can be configured to override and customize in safe ways via a workflow and permissions system. 2. Built-in support for Flatfish—a Ruby library we wrote to make it easy to migrate your legacy site. By working with HTML, Flatfish avoids messy database schemas, backend platform concerns (eg Oracle or MS SQL with various versions), and VPN credentials or FERPA/confidential data concerns—you can literally start moving your old site today! 3. Permissions and workflow designed with Universities on Trekk in mind. Trekk has built-in roles and permissions to make it easy to share content without worrying about breaking branding, policies, or governance; but at the same time allows department or school client sites to maintain their autonomy—customizing look and feel where appropriate. We’re incredibly excited to announce this Distribution. Come learn more about Trekk’s benefits and a basic overview of the implementation. We look forward to sharing our work so far and hearing your thoughts and ideas. Speaker(s): Christopher Jones Experience Level: BeginnerTRANSCRIPT
TrekkThe Next Evolution of Drupal in the University
Introduction
Drupal Connect – expert Drupal development
Higher Ed Experience – Stanford, Stevens Institute of Technology, Georgetown, Yale, Point Loma Nazarene University
Chris Jones – Senior Developer, Trekk co-developer
What is Trekk?
A Drupal distribution for universities
Aimed at schools and large departments
Why Another Distribution?
Clients repeatedly looking to: Intelligently share data across
sites And migrate content, often from
awkward legacy systems (HTML, Oracle, MS SQL, etc)
Other Distros: Different Needs
Open Academy Faculty and department sites—
focuses on ease of use, drag-and-drop.
Open EDU Brand new. Multi-site focus.
Trekk Serves Different Needs
Intelligently share content Migrate content from legacy systems Reduce the costs of duplicated effort Strengthen brand recognition Reconcile competing editorial priorities Enrich the user experience
What Trekk Does
Flexible content sharing More than just Views + RSS More than one way to share
Flexible workflows Enforce brand and policy compliance Empower diverse constituencies
What’s Stopping You
Migration is costly and complex New systems need to interoperate with
legacy systems Legacy systems can be difficult to
migrate
Meet Flatfish
Designed to do two things: Save on costs Shrink time linesAll while streamlining planning and QA
What Trekk Isn't
A turnkey solution Focused on layouts and content types Another layer of dashboards and wizards Meant for faculty and small department
sites
Is Trekk Right for Me?
Do you have: Numerous large sites running on Drupal Legacy sites to migrate A complex organizational structure that
needs flexibility A requirement to share content in a
robust yet flexible manner Brand compliance requirements
