By Ben Finklea on

MIT’s School of Science wanted to move from a flat HTML site to a full-featured Drupal content management system, complete with a ground-up redesign. The ambitious new build includes feed-driven listings for faculty, departments, academic programs, news and events in addition to housing the school newsletter and policies/procedures database, all nested within a gorgeous, responsive framework.

MIT School of Science was a 2013 Blue Drop Awards finalist for Best Education Website Built With Drupal.

Visit science.mit.edu →
Why Drupal was chosen: 

There is a movement at MIT dedicated to using Drupal as their primary new website platform.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

MIT’s School of Science required a custom designed site that could handle multiple listing feeds throughout many areas and house a database of newsletters, policies and procedures for the department. Drupal in itself was a requirement because of MIT’s dedication to using Drupal throughout their schools. A mobile-friendly design with the new look was also asked for and included. The result is a robust, multi-layered Drupal 7 powered site with a sleek responsive design and framework and highly-functioning database system.

Technical specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used: 
Feeds
Workbench Moderation
Panels
Zen
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Feeds: Many content types, including News, Events, Schools/Programs/Centers and Faculty/Staff come from external sources. The Feeds module is used to manage this data.

Workbench moderation: Workbench moderation manages a complex role based content workflow including authoring, moderation and publishing.

Panels: Panels were used for assistance in responsive layouts and CTools custom content plugins for complex logic.

Zen Theme: Zen is a simple and stripped-down starter theme great for full customization. It comes built in with SASS and a responsive framework.

Project team: 

Development Company: Common Media, Inc.

Sectors: 
Education