It's raining all over Unicamp

Last Friday, the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), onde of the biggest universities in South America and responsible for 15% of all research done in Brazilian universities, released its new website in our beloved CMS.

Part of the website was running on a Zope-based home-grown CMS and another part of it were just static HTML pages. Since last Friday, it has a new look and a new platform. Drupal will allow us to add exciting new features to the website and make it more and more useful to the academic community. This is the begnining of a long-term relationship with Unicamp, which will hopefully include a continuous improvement for the portal and porting other internal websites.

This website relies heavily on Views, CCK and Panels, especially for the home page. We have a hybrid solution for the images: we're using Image module for photos and Imagefield for the banners. Image are attached to content with Image Filter and a modified version of Image Attach (all modifications are in process of being given back to the community and we will hopefully merge the versions). We also received very specific requests for the administrative interface: the front page is not like a blog, a river of news, it's layout is strictly defined by a journalist. We're using a CCK field weight and the administrative interface was developed with Views and with the fuzzy but promising Editable Fields modules, which will get some love soon. Static pages are using book module, due to the hierarchical structure of the website.

Migrating all the content to Drupal was hard. The news were made available in a pseudo-CSV format. The static content pages, on the other hand, were just HTML and sometimes with no pattern at all. So, they gone through a semi-automatic crawler-helped importing and, next, human revision.

Finally, a highlight for Drupal performance. The old website was installed on the very same machine that hosted the old one. Interestingly enough, with more than ten thousand access a day, Drupal and its internal cache managed to answer as quick as the static pages.

Comments are open and welcome! :-)