College/University website?

[pushfrog98]

Has anyone used Mambo/Joomla to create a college/university website?  I am currently planning the development of a college website and we narrowed down the field of opensource CMS' to Mambo and well, Joomla.  None of the other OpenSource CMS' seemed to be as well developed as Joomla(i'll keep calling it joomla since i don't like the "m" word anymore ).  I've also not noticed as large and helpful of a community as the joomla community.

I just wanted some advise (as I am a fresh newb to joomla) on what I should be looking for as far as components and functionality within the cms.  Also, if anyone DOES know of any college/universities that are using joomla please let me know, so I can see what they have done.  Thanks!

Jared

[deleted user]

A Mambo university radio station, perhaps?

I don't know of any full-blown uni sites done using Mambo.

[pushfrog98]

Yeah, I checked that site out, but yeah, not a full-blown uni site.  we have already developed an intranet site for campus bulletins, news updates, virus/spyware/e-mail hoax problems, athletic updates and the whatnot.  we want to integrate the actual website with the intranet site and since they will both be using joomla, it will be nice and uniform.

[ledzep]

Has anyone used Mambo/Joomla to create a college/university website?  I am currently planning the development of a college website and we narrowed down the field of opensource CMS' to Mambo and well, Joomla.  None of the other OpenSource CMS' seemed to be as well developed as Joomla(i'll keep calling it joomla since i don't like the "m" word anymore ).  I've also not noticed as large and helpful of a community as the joomla community.

I just wanted some advise (as I am a fresh newb to joomla) on what I should be looking for as far as components and functionality within the cms.  Also, if anyone DOES know of any college/universities that are using joomla please let me know, so I can see what they have done.  Thanks!

Jared

The question could be what do you want to do with it?  Joomla is pretty fexible and has a large wealth of components and modules.

BTW I saw your reply on another post (11/2 hours from Paris).  Where might you be (Vash and I are partners)?  Maybe we could meet up?

[ogulinac]

Croatian Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (Department of Telecommunications) has recently went to mambo/joomla. You can check it here http://tel.fer.hr

[jonhurlock]

A Mambo university radio station, perhaps?

I don't know of any full-blown uni sites done using Mambo.

[quote author =pushfrog98]Yeah, I checked that site out, but yeah, not a full-blown uni site.  we have already developed an intranet site for campus bulletins, news updates, virus/spyware/e-mail hoax problems, athletic updates and the whatnot.  we want to integrate the actual website with the intranet site and since they will both be using joomla, it will be nice and uniform.[/quote]

Ok depending on the size of the University / College and the courses it offeres you could probably create a main Mainmambo site which then goes off on to "mini joomla" sites for each department. Giving each department an individual look and feel! This obviously would take masses of space and resources but may be an "easy" solution!

[teng]

Here's one:
The University of Ottawa School of Management
http://www3.management.uottawa.ca/

Another one:
http://www.msuiit.edu.ph/

You could browse http://www.mamboforge.net or http://www.mamboportal.com for modules and components that you need. 

[pushfrog98]

The question could be what do you want to do with it?  Joomla is pretty fexible and has a large wealth of components and modules.

BTW I saw your reply on another post (11/2 hours from Paris).  Where might you be (Vash and I are partners)?  Maybe we could meet up?

Well, our current website is astronomically huge... if you want to take a peek at it, it's located at http://www.greenville.edu

We want to keep the site consistent, as far as appearance, but I like what joomla.org has done, where each section has a different background color.  We would have to keep the main school colors of green and gold, but I think we could spice it up a bit.

As far as where I am located...  grand ole Greenville, Il.  I asked my wife how far paris was, and she said it's a bit futher than 1 1/2 hours... it's almost 2 hours, I think.  I'm about 40 minutes from St. Louis.

[jonhurlock]

I think you are over-estimating how big your site is!

As most of the content on your site is maily "static" content i think Joomla could handle this really easily! You would just have to create "conent sections" for Student Resources, Staff Resources etc.

Your site seems fairly flat. There are no "subsites" such as departmental site e.g.  from http://www.swan.ac.uk each department has its own site (this is not a Joomla site)

Im sure Joomla will be able to handle your site with ease! It will just need carefull planning!

Jon

[pushfrog98]

Jon, I guess by "huge" i meant the amount of static content that is on there.  There are a lot of subcategories, but the entire site uses 1 template, there are just minor changes, like the picture on the left.  Our athletic site is a seperate component that I helped develop, so it will be left untouched when we switch to joomla.  We also need to figure out what content only needs to be internal, and what needs to be external.

[jonhurlock]

I don't know how much you've looked at Joomla. but

We also need to figure out what content only needs to be internal, and what needs to be external.

Joomla will handle this with ease with the use of its User Management Feature! Giving certain users certain privileges!

We want to keep the site consistent, as far as appearance, but I like what joomla.org has done, where each section has a different background color.  We would have to keep the main school colors of green and gold, but I think we could spice it up a bit.

Joomlas template manager will also be able to handle this with ease even if it is just changing the background colour or the Font Colours etc. Letting you assign certain pages certain templates!

Our athletic site is a separate component that I helped develop, so it will be left untouched when we switch to joomla.

Nice little site 

Jon

[pushfrog98]

I don't know how much you've looked at Joomla. but

We also need to figure out what content only needs to be internal, and what needs to be external.

Joomla will handle this with ease with the use of its User Management Feature! Giving certain users certain privileges!

We want to keep the site consistent, as far as appearance, but I like what joomla.org has done, where each section has a different background color.  We would have to keep the main school colors of green and gold, but I think we could spice it up a bit.

Joomlas template manager will also be able to handle this with ease even if it is just changing the background colour or the Font Colours etc. Letting you assign certain pages certain templates!

Our athletic site is a separate component that I helped develop, so it will be left untouched when we switch to joomla.

Nice little site 

Jon

Thanks...    I do have a question about users... we use some windows Active Directory thing for the servers that keeps track of all the student ID numbers, passwords and other information.  How easy would it be to integrate that into joomla?  I think i should just check out all the components and modules, and try to figure out A) what we need, B) What we might want, and C) what I myself want.

Any suggestions on good calendar systems?  I've seen a few, but not sure which is the "best."

[jonhurlock]

Any suggestions on good calendar systems?  I've seen a few, but not sure which is the "best."

I use Events Calendar from http://mamboforge.net/projects/events/  It allows you to pick how you view the entries e.g. Day / Week/ Month / Year / By Category / By Search Results. It also allows you to use CSS to customize the look of it! If you want to see it in use here it is in use at my site :

With a side module
http://www.swanseastudent.net/mambo/ind ... com_events

Without a side module
http://www.swanseastudent.net/mambo/ind ... &Itemid=50

I do warn you this site is under construction so the "right" modules hasn't been setup correctly. Also not all of the CSS is complete!

About the synchronisation with Windows Active Directory i personally don't know any "bridge" but there may be one out there try  http://www.mamboforge.net

If you looking for handy component check out this page "http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=48122" it has some of the most handy components listed 

Jon

[kenmcd]

school - BYU Facilities Management Program
http://www.et.byu.edu/fm/index.php?opti ... e&Itemid=1

school - New York Divinity School - Mission & Purpose
http://www.nydivinityschool.org/cms/content/view/20/41/

school - St. Peter's Catholic Primary School - Welcome to St. Peter's Catholic Primary School
http://www.st-peters-rc.lancsngfl.ac.uk ... &Itemid=43

school - School of Management - École de gestion
http://www3.management.uottawa.ca/

school - Bournemouth and East Dorset School Centred Initial Teacher Training
http://www.bedscitt.hostquest.co.uk/

school - The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School
http://research.yale.edu/culturalcognition/

school - Saint Mary's School - Home
http://www.pureps.com/

school - Manhattan Country School - Manhattan Country School
http://www.mcsparents.org/mcstest/index.php


college related

College Codex
http://collegecodex.com/

CultureU
http://www.cultureu.org/content/view/30/67/

[pushfrog98]

Ken, Thanks for the links!  I will be checking those out!

Also, How good is joomla with "static" urls?  like instead of .php?adsl=252345;something=26211, having it be like "/content/subfolder/index.php" or something like that...  I know with Drupal (booooo!!!), it was "easy" to do the mod_rewrite, but then the folder names were like "/droplet/somedrupalthing/content" and it wasn't very "tidy" if you know what i mean.  I use too many quotes, i'm going to shut up now.  THanks a LOT for all your input though!

[paladin]

There are many college sites created by mambo. try google to search some

[kheme]

joomla has a pluging that changes the url into search engin friendly urls, for example 'blablabla.com/index.php?option=com_article&view=category&parent_id=1' will be replaced with 'blablabla.com/index.php/articles/56-sample-joomla-content.html' or something similar.

i've been given a task to redevelop my school website (www.lefke.edu.tr) and i'm proposing to do so using joomla. i'd re post here my progress

[pushfrog98]

Good luck! When we started our site, joomla was just starting itself. There weren't any good built-in clean URL plugins and the OpenSEF plugin worked nicely until the page totals went up... then it was doing thousands of db queries everytime someone visited a single page. Needless to say, if you had several hundred people viewing the site, the server would crash. That was always fun.