Today, I rolled out a new version of our intranet portal home page to the school. The change was required since our main website gained social community features formerly on this site (blog, forum, directory, carpool map, photo galleries, video publishing, etc.). The site still runs Moodle and a number of custom Perl and PHP scripts, but it no longer runs Drupal or Gallery. I also took the opportunity to make it easier to read. Let me know what you think of the redesign. How do you manage your intranet portal?
The home page still shows different items depending on one’s Active Directory group membership.
My view
Typical student view
Previous versions
2008-09
2007-08
2006-07
2004-06
2002-03
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Technology and Learning Innovation at
Looks great!
Looks clean! So un-Moodle-like. How did you do it? And are you really not using Drupal? I’d love to hear what informed that decision, and how you are doing those community things that Drupal is so good at.
Bob, this is a custom home page that lives at index.php, whereas Moodle lives at /moodle. I wrote some custom code to pull the username of the most recently logged in user from the Moodle cookie and then query Moodle to populate the left-hand column that shows the user’s Moodle courses. This works great when a computer has just one user, but it can confuse students in shared computing facilities. They have to recognize the need to log out and then log in as themselves.
As of this past July, we now run Drupal for our public-facing website, which now hosts our community features. I chose to remove it from our intranet, so as to avoid confusing users as to where community content should live. The intranet has now become a place for small group content (classes, clubs, departments, etc.). Also, we realized that blogs, forums, classroom pages could reach our entire community, not just teachers and students, and therefore fit better on the public-facing website. It’s not a perfect division, but we had to draw the line somewhere.
I probably missed something here, but … what do you use for your intranet now?
Our intranet is a combination of Moodle and custom scripts for functions like bookstore, community service hours, transportation calendar, and a bunch more. The home page is custom PHP as well. Moodle is for course websites and a few club and department sites.
Richard
Very nice! Thanks, Richard.