Sector(s)
Project Team
This project was executed as a close collaboration between Aten Design Group and Stanford Summer Session.
Stanford Summer Session extends a transformative educational experience to ambitious, high-achieving students. With programs available for high school, graduate and undergraduate participants, Stanford Summer Session combines challenging academics and rich student life activities that directly reflect the University’s culture of innovation, academic excellence, and global responsibility.
About the project
In the fall of 2016, Stanford Summer Session merged with High School Summer College to leverage collaborative opportunities, consolidate functional teams and better serve students of both programs. The result is a unified Stanford Summer Session, providing transformative educational programs to ambitious students at high school, undergraduate and graduate levels.
The Stanford Summer Session website needed to serve two primary functions: first, to effectively market its unique educational programming to prospective students; second, to provide access to events and communication specific to enrolled participants in the program. Once registered, students use their Stanford credentials to login to the system and gain access to persona-specific events and alerts.
The marketing site features an interactive tuition calculator built with Vue.js but fully editable in Drupal. All the text is dynamically filled with content, and the Paragraphs module was used to model the data. Entity content was processed for javascript using Drupal 8’s serialization module.
An interactive course search was built with SearchAPI and Views to build a unique results list with minimal custom code. Courses are listed by category, which shows a count, then categories are grouped by their first letter. The entire list is searchable and filterable. To simplify the publishing process, we built a bulk-upload feature that allows editors to curate the entire list in a spreadsheet and add it to the website in a single push.
The full screen background images were added using the Background Images Formatter module which easily solves the problem of making decorative elements in the theme editable in Drupal.
Drupal 8’s block placement was enhanced with Block Visibility Groups, and page content was placed in headers and sidebars blocks, views and content view modes.
With a Stanford SUnet login, students have access to a dashboard, with content filtered by their student level (high school, undergraduate, veteran). This level is applied to their Drupal user during login by detecting the SimpleSAML workgroup the student was assigned to by Stanford Admin.
Why Drupal was chosen
Flexibility, modular architecture, and broad adoption/support for Drupal across the University were primary factors for choosing Drupal 8.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Prototype is a base theme that provides component-based theming.
Media and Media Entity are now in Core; during development these were contrib modules.
Stanford SUNet uses SimpleSAML for Single Sign-On. Leveraging users' SUNet IDs, Drupal roles are inherited from SUNet workgroups.
