Portland State University Multi-site Drupal Installation

Portland State University (PSU) is an urban, public state university located in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1946, it has the largest overall enrollment of any university in the state of Oregon, including undergraduate and graduate students. It is also the only public university in the state that is located in a major metropolitan city.

After previous efforts to address the aging CMS system proved unsuccessful, PSU contracted Swipht Technologies to assist in migrating 60+ department websites with the ability to grow to several hundred from a long orphaned and unsupported CMS system into the widely popular Open Source framework and content management system, Drupal. The new system had to support central sign-on, a sophisticated security policy, and provide a means to share content between different departments and organization websites.

The solution combined community and custom development to implement a multi-site Drupal system. The effort was separated into three main areas. The first was the design and development of a flexible department site that included a deployment process that rapidly deployed sites using a default set of settings, security, and features. The second effort was the development of a centralized syndication server to provide shared content and media that would be pushed to every department site on-demand. And the third effort, involved the migration and conversion of the content and site structures from the old CMS system into the multi-site Drupal framework.

Drupal Department Site Features:

Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
Ldap user account migration (custom work)
Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
Google Search Appliance Integration
Per-site media management
WYSIWYG Editor integration
Generic Analytics integration (custom work)
Google Analytics integration
Search Engine Optimized XML Sitemap
Content Access Security (custom work)
Menu Access Security (custom work)
Syndication client management and display (custom work)
PSU Drupal theme (used on all sites)
PSU Home Drupal theme
Sophisticated Drupal theme settings and media management (custom work)

Drupal Syndication Server Features:

Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
Ldap user account migration (custom work)
Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
Content Access Security (custom work)
Menu Access Security (custom work)
Custom content authoring (news, events, profiles, faqs)
Multi-category tagging and classification system
Web-services XML syndication framework (community/custom work)

Results

The statistics speak volumes for the solution provided---the old system would take as long as 2-12 seconds to return a page request and the old system could only support up to 100 concurrent users on all 60+ websites. When the site was switched over to the Drupal system the time it took for a page to return to a user went down to 4-10 milliseconds and the number of concurrent users increased by a factor of 10---over 1000 concurrent users per request.

The Drupal system provides a stable platform to manage multiple department sites using a centralized code base. And because of the design it is possible to provide sub-site specific features and themes without having any adverse effects to other sub-sites. The Drupal framework provides a foundation for Portland State University to meet their communication, community, and content management needs while also providing a framework for future expansion and growth.

Portland State is currently running approximately 130 websites with a single Drupal instance. It's growing every week because of the custom application Swipht built to quickly clone and deploy new sites in a matter of minutes.

Technologies

PHP
MySQL
Drupal 6
LAMP