Drupal is an obvious choice for schools and online education platforms. It's a flexible content management platform built to handle numerous users with different permissions, empowers collaboration, and organizes large volumes of content with easily.
What sets it apart from the pack of other content management systems? Well, besides it being open source, Drupal features a deep reservoir of highly-refined software modules (the building blocks of a website) with the exact features necessary to create a sophisticated and dynamic education-focused website.
In addition to suites of modules specifically compiled to form education themes, Drupal features a variety of modules that, when combined, form online education platforms customized to fit the specific needs of a school based on its individual characteristics. That's why Drupal is the CMS of choice for many prestigious universities like Georgetown, Columbia University, University of Oxford, University of Oregon, and many others.
Let's take a look at 10 popular Drupal modules
selected from Drupal.org's list of the 100 most frequently employed modules—that feature functionality making them particularly suited for education-related websites.
1. Views
Views allow you to organize and show your content to the world in a variety of ways; this is great for education platforms because it will enable you to do things like creating lists displaying all class assignments a student has submitted, but only viewable to the student who is currently accessing the page (so it's contextual). It allows teachers and administrators to migrate everyday classroom tasks online. Since views are used by over half a million Drupal websites (it's the 2nd most popular module after all), you can bet it's pretty useful.
2. WYSIWYG
WYSIWYG is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get.” It’s an editor that helps you create and edit the content on your website without the need for any HTML or CSS coding. In fact, the WYSIWYG content editor allows you to see how the content will appear on a web page as soon as you make a change. In this article, we’ll talk about the characteristics of a good WYSIWYG and check the best WYSIWYG Drupal content editor.
Read more about How to Choose the Best WYSIWYG Drupal Content Editor?
3. Views Slideshow
PowerPoint's presentation it is not: Views Slideshow can be used to create a slideshow of any content (not just images) and can be integrated across your website—ensuring that your school or university's website always features beautiful and relevant content.
4. Features
This module combines and streamlines the management of website features like a blog, a pressroom, image galleries, e-commerce stores, and more. All of these are near-necessities when it comes to running a dynamic online education platform, and the Feature's module trims off all the technical fat associated with administering such features and thereby saves all non-programmers numerous migraine headaches.
5. Panels
This nifty module allows a site administrator to use a drag-and-drop content manager to create customized layouts that can display multiple types of content. Unlike most CMSs, with Drupal you can actively change and customize your content display—that's something you're not going to get with a basic CMS, which usually offers dull, static layouts. So not only do panels help make Drupal an attractive option for schools with steady content streams and an eye for tasteful aesthetics, it's also a good tool for just about any website.
6. Media
The Media module provides an extensible framework for managing files and multimedia assets. The Media module is particularly useful for online education platforms because it allows them to easily host a wide array of multimedia learning tools onsite, and the framework ensures that such assets won't clutter up site performance or disrupt other content.
7. Display Suite
This module allows you to fully control how your content is displayed using a drag-and-drop interface without having to work your way through dozens of template files. Its templates are customized to fit your platform's unique branding and aesthetics, so your content is always consistent.
8. Calendar
It's exactly what it sounds like, but it's still incredibly useful—especially for schools and universities, two outfits are known for being very dependent on knowing the date. And Drupal's Calendar module provides users with more than just a static embedded image of whichever month it happens to be; it integrates with content editing and layout modules to create a customizable resource for compiling all school events, holidays, and make-up snow-days.
9. Insert
This module combines with the WYSIWYG editor to provide a seamless way to insert images and links to files into text areas—a basic sounding procedure, but a task that can be quite complex for novice content editors if a CMS doesn't have a module that simplifies the JavaScript processes that make it possible. Thankfully, Drupal's Insert makes this a simple task for anyone, ensuring that schools can populate their content with relevant images and links (two things that happen to help improve SEO too).
10. Simplenews
Developed specifically for publishing and delivering newsletters to a list of subscribers, this module provides schools and universities with a superior way to reach out and engage with students, parents, and donors.
Now, these ten maybe some of the most frequently used modules that coincidentally work very well for education-related websites, but Drupal also offers numerous modules that are less popular overall (remember, not all websites are education-focused) but happen to work exceedingly well for online education websites. Interested in learning more? Check out these school and university websites that we've built using Drupal. Or drop us a comment below or an email.