Features, Feeds and OpenLayers at work for an EU-funded project

Features, Feeds and OpenLayers at work for an EU-funded project

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The European Campus project http://europeancampus.eu/ was funded by the European Union in order to provide an attractive and informative entry-point for overseas prospective students who wanted to pursue a Master's Course in Europe.

Besides the central website, an outcome of the project was a Drupal Installation profile, the Master's Course Template site, soon to be contributed to Drupal.org and currently used for about 100 sites.

We will show how the existing modules helped in the project, and the tweaking we had to do:

• Features was used throughout the development cycle and used as the only way to store site configuration; this way it is possible to upgrade all installed templates to a new version and apply significant configuration changes while not touching the site content.

• Feeds provided a powerful and reliable communication channel from the template sites to the central platform, allowing for exposure of always up-to-date information on http://europeancampus.eu/ with no effort.

• OpenLayers-based mapping, with custom-made geocoding capabilities shared with the community http://drupal.org/project/openlayers_geocoder is used on both the templates (to list the partner universities) and the central website (to show search results on a map of Europe and allow location-based searches).

• Faceted Search powers the search interface on the aggregator site, with custom-made interface to OpenLayers to show results on a map.

The BoF is meant to present the state of the project, almost completed, and to investigate together how to place the installation profile on drupal.org and gradually hand development over to the community.

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