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By pmagunia on
Using Drupal and other open source software, Quadstat.com provides computing and publishing tools useful to statistics students. The site backend is driven by Drupal and R.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal delivers a scalable framework to expedite website construction. Many useful features are built into core and can be easily extended with contributed modules. WordPress and Joomla were considered as possible content management systems for the Quadstat site. Joomla had a number of extensions which may have been useful for site construction though many of them carried premium price against the spirit of open source; Literature indicated that WordPress was faster for light traffic, but did not scale with spikes occurring at different times of the day.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The original intent was to sustainably convey statistics education to students with little or no cost in the form of static web pages delivering information about math and statistics. While this approach is great for search engine optimization, it does not address engaging student interest. Quadstat realized making statistics interactive is a great way to increase student success with hands-on learning. Instead of a giving the students a site about statistics, the goal became giving the students a place to learn and do statistics.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The Webform module provides invaluable functionality to provide a submission for user inquries to R. This module was extended to allow custom elements to be used as R inputs for dataset columns and R function parameters Many thanks to jrockowitz for providing a very functional, and well-maintained module.
Quadstat is tightly integrated with the Seven theme which provides a beautiful, functional structure that is cross-browser friendly.
Also, the Markup module provided a textarea for the Slickgrid library which is available on Github with over 6000 current users. Slickgrid provides the JavaScript to edit and view datasets.
The Quadstat Core and Quadstat Miscellaneous modules provides most of the unique dataset and application functionality found with the Quadstat Drupal distribution.
Community contributions:
North Penn Networks also sponsored the Whiteboard, R Filter, and LaTeX Toolbar modules for Drupal 7.
Team members:
Project team:
Parag Magunia - https://www.drupal.org/u/pmagunia
Sectors:
Education
Technology
