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By OpenSense Labs on
Techtud is a contribution-centric social network for technical students.It suitably combines various social networking features to maximize the user engagement and improvise learning experience. Techtud currently gets 500,000 page views per month to serve 20,000+ users all around the globe.
Why Drupal was chosen:
V1.0 of techtud was started with a drupal 6 installation profile “ArrayShift”.So, as such there was no decision making. While doing the first feature upgrade OpenSense Labs considered drupal due to the following reasons:
- It’s Free!!: Drupal being a free tool helps strat-ups to build upon their ideas.
- Huge Module Database: Due to a great number of modules and themes drupal becomes a unmatchable tool for rapid prototyping.
- Strong and highly active drupal community: When we started drupal, we were new to the technology so we needed a platform whose community behind is quite active so that we can get instant support.
- Security: Regular update and huge community contribution makes it secure.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Overview
Techtud was started with a motive to serve students with their doubt clearance. The ultimate idea was to promote the culture of open learning and sharing with a highly
active and engaging platform. However, when it comes to user-engagement features, a number of things can be built and many of them may not be relevant to an edu-social platform. As, educational content varies from video to text, another major challenge was to identify the content type, structure and its presentation for easy discovery. Being a social network, most of the content generation was to be done by users, so quality assurance was a prime goal. With world shifting to D7, there was a need of whole system to be migrated and new features to be rebuilt in drupal7.
Project Goals:
Full migration to D7
Custom responsive theme
Adding features to make it a complete social network
Various third party integration
Easy content creation for end user
Performance improvement by caching
Project Process:
It was the idea only which was clear but their exact requirement had to be evolve with the user’s response . They also wanted to have a flexibility to turn some features down if it proves to be of less use. So, OpenSense Labs preferred to use an Agile process. The project was completed in 6 sprints lasting 2 weeks each.
Process
OpenSense Labs extensively used JIRA and Slack for the ticketing and other communication.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
User Experience:
ajax_comments: The modules enables the user to post comment without refreshing the page .
Chosen: Techtud had many select fields with a large number of elements in it. Chosen module gives a great user experience by enhancing the default select to much more user friendly.
comment_delete: Drupal by default doesn’t allow non-admin user to delete comment. This module helped to achieve this functionality.
CKEditor: Techtud is content intensive where end user is expected to create and share content. This module helps to replace textarea fields with a visual HTML editor which gives a WYSIWYG experience.
hierarchical_select: Techtud has huge number of terms as each content is tagged with some topic. This large number of terms also have a hierarchy and user is expected to select the child most suitable term. Hierarchical_select serves all the needs here.
mentions: User mention is a most desirable feature to improve online interaction experience. This module also integrate with CKEditor to support user tagging.
imce: Great tool for file browsing including image upload.
mathjax: Allows to write Mathematical equation and displays on webpage. Indeed a great tool for academia.
Functionality:
complete_profile: Forces user to fill some mandatory information on their first login.
course: The module adds the functionality of Course out of the box. It also allows to choose existing content type as course content type.
diff: Techtud has a lot of content type which are wikifiable. Diff module give better visibility of the difference between the two versions of a content.
Elysia_cron: A great cron management tool which gives fine grain control over each task giving flexibility to schedule each individual task separately.
field_collection: Techtud allows users to save collective information where a field collection can be created in which any number of field can be attached.
flag: Techtud being an educational social network, flagging plays a vital role. User uses like-dislike, bookmark, follow another user, report spam, subscribe and many more which is built around flag.
h5p: h5p library adds interaction to the video content so, a video lecture can be made interactive with this module. Moreover it also provides many more interactive content type which can be integrated to a drupal site.
memcache: memory caching system that drastically decreases dynamic page load time by caching data and objects in RAM.
mollom: mollom is a intelligent content moderation system powered by machine learning.
morecomments: Enables the functionality to load a content with less numbers of comment on it. User can load more content if at he/she wants
og: Adds a major functionality of creating virtual groups among the users.
privatemsg: Private messaging among the users
profile2: On Techtud a user is suppose to have multiple kind of profile like, general, academic, social etc.
queue_mail: Sending synchronous mail causes a performance issue.
quiz: Conducting an online quiz with the selected set of question. It supports MCQ, Short answer, Matching type and many more.
rate: The module adds the functionality to rate (like-dislike, fivestar, etc) the content.
rules: Techtud extensively rely on rules to manage all the following things to an event.
simple_subscription: Manages all the subscription on the site. It also gives a form bloc out of the box to collect the email from users.
smtp: This modules helps to send smtp mail from the website. The module supports SMTP authentication and can even connect to servers using SSL
taxonomy_manager: Techtud has 8 vocabularies having more than 5K terms in it. Users are also allowed to create terms so it is increasing everyday. Taxonomy manager is a great tool to manage this large database of terms.
tb_megamenu: Module provides a highly configurable mega menu.
userpoints: Every user has some kerma point based on their activity on the site. Userpoints module handles all the point transaction with the help of rules
views: Well, most powerful module on drupal.org. It handles all the dynamic content display on the site techtud.
views_infinite_scroll: Adds the functionality of infinite scroll to views to keep loading the things on the same page.
voting_rules: This module create a bridge between voting api and rules to handle the points assignment on a selected event.
votingapi: The module helps developers who want to use a standardized API and schema for storing, retrieving, and tabulating votes for Drupal content
youtube_uploader: This module solved all the problem of video hosting and streaming by integrating youtube. Using this techtud is able to provide an abstract layer for uploading video directly on youtube from the site.
Community contributions:
Indeed Search: Integration of indeed search to provide a job search functionality on a drupal site.
EqnEditor: Better equation editor by integrating codecoges equation editor.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Sectors:
Community
Education
Non-profit
Social Networking
Comments
It's very cool that there is
It's very cool that there is a Techtud that allows technical students to communicate and share experiences. I want to recommend another resource that helped me with learning math. It's called https://plainmath.net/post-secondary/calculus-and-analysis and it has been very helpful in learning complex topics that I haven't been able to understand for a long time. There are many examples that can be analyzed in detail, and you can turn for help to professional mathematicians who can help. All students with math problems should try this resource.