I work at a small college and historically the students are not given an email account but can use their personal email account for "school business" The problem is that students have email addresses like "sexybabe123@example.com"

Does your school give out a school email address for students to use?
What platform is used to manage students emails (exchange, etc)? Specifically, does anyone have experience with using google apps as their provider? Google apps seems like a great way to go but what the disadvantages?

Drupal in Education

Penn State Multimedia specialist (Online Education Technology Integrator) Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Not allowed

The Eberly College of Science is seeking a highly skilled professional for the job of Online Education Technology Integrator. This job will report to the Director of Online Education with accountability to the Director of Information Technology. The selected individual will be expected to: collaborate with clients to assess multimedia needs; identify, develop and implement appropriate technology solutions for information delivery; create training resources and related documentation; provide specialized guidance to other staff; coordinate and lead various projects related to the development of multimedia technologies in online education environments; act as liaison with College and University committees and task forces, other institutions, external organizations, as well as vendors; provide advice and guidance in the design of systems, concepts and solutions; research and be knowledgeable in existing and emerging methods utilizing potential innovations in hardware, software, and Internet technologies; evaluate and assess applicability to the College’s needs. This job will be filled as a level 3 (mid-level), or level 4 (advanced), depending upon the successful candidate’s education and experience. Typically requires Bachelor’s degree plus four years of related experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience for a level 3. Additional experience and/or education and competencies are required for higher level jobs. Must have a thorough understanding of Web standards, content management frameworks and design techniques as they apply to interface design. Demonstrated experience with and a solid understanding of Drupal, PHP, CSS, Flash and video streaming is required. Expert knowledge of web technologies, WC3 standards, Web 2.0 applications, cross-browser and platform issues, social media and Web production is preferred. Experience with MySQL, jQuery, CSS-driven layouts and HTML 5 is desired. The successful candidate should exhibit excellent communication, organizational, and project management skills, as well as demonstrate a dedication to quality and customer service. Prior experience in art and/or design is preferred. This is a fixed-term appointment funded for one year from date of hire with excellent possibility of re-funding.

Search for job number 32539 on the external link to apply. Penn State is bringing a lot of Drupal experts on board, come join the 1337 educators :)

http://psu.jobs/Search/Opportunities.html Higher Education

Hey folks in K-12 land (especially to the ones in small independent schools):

A quick update on the current status of CiviSchool:

1. We've build an Application Form and workflow to manage the application process for a school in NY. Its a bit specific to their needs currently but we plan in making it a lot more configurable. A detailed blog post and screenshots is here: http://civicrm.org/blogs/deepak/civischool-application-form-admissions

2. The online form process to manage and maintain family information for school parents has been rolled into production and things are going quite smoothly there. A detailed blog post and screenshots is here: http://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/civischool-online-forms-update-student-fam...

3. Our past update on this group is here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/74178

4. We now have a dedicated forum board for CiviSchool discussions: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,55.0.html

5. We currently have 4 schools going live with parts of the system this coming year. We hope to get a few more before the academic year starts

lobo

Drupal in Education

Hi there

I'm looking for some advice on taxonomies and tagging.

I've got a main site taxonomy that users can add to and can select multiple terms.

This works well up to a point - I've been tagging stuff and have created blocks such as 'related events' which appear on pages that share the same taxonomy term.

Obviously there is a tipping point where you can end up with too many 'related items'. Events or news for example can be limited to those that are current.

On certain pages I've got a 'related resources' (by taxonomy term) block and a user has tagged up these resources (around a 100) with multiple tags - around a quarter have been tagged with the same tag say 'assessment' so you get a long list of related resources.

I'm wondering how to manage this - instead of a related resources list do I have a 'tagged under' list of terms linking to the taxonomy term pages?

Also for example if there is a page 'Award' then subpages by year 'Award winners 2009' etc if they all get tagged 'Award' that's not that helpful as in the 'related content' list you'd only really need a link to the parent page rather than to all of the subpages.

I think I maybe coming at taxonomies from a slightly wrong angle or need to advise users to be a bit more targetted with their tagging.

Apologies for the poor english, I've just needed to get this out of my system!

Drupal in Education

there are two parts: Competency repository and the competency-to-product mapping module

Competency Repository

The repository is a space/site dedicated to storing community defined Drupal-related competencies. But what is a competency? How are competencies organized? I have been doing some pondering and tested my thoughts with a google search.

Definitions: According to http://managementhelp.org/staffing/specify/cmptncys/cmptncys.htm, "Job descriptions typically list the tasks or functions and responsibilities for a role, whereas competencies list the abilities needed to conduct those tasks or functions. Consequently, competencies are often used as a basis for training by converting competencies to learning objectives." By definition "A competence is the ability to perform a specific task, action or function successfully."

General Requirement: These search results provide a way to hone what we already have started in such a way that I think many will be able to relate. So for our repository, I propose we need a way to capture 'ability statements' that can be mapped to tasks and their associated processes with the site life-cycle.

Examples: We have this started in our spreadsheet. For instance, the ability to 'Create a new content type.' The task might be 'content type development' and this task is probably associated with the 'build/development process'. Another example might be the ability to 'Create a node.' The task could be 'content development' and the process 'content management'. Another example might be the ability to 'Use the hook_form_alter API to change a form.' The task might be module development and the process might me the build/development process (like the example above).

Model?: We might want to look at how D7 organizes default tasks in Drupal to see if that task organization is a good model. It would certainly help sync up this effort with Drupal going forward.

Requirement Specs: Assuming all are in agreement with my assumptions above, I propose the repository have and do the following.

Competency field - long enough for a sentence (255 chars? or more?). Has a child relationship with the task field. Can have more than one task parent. Needs to be only one sentence/statement with an action verb (e.g., create, define, install, configure, etc).

Task field - should be a shorter statement (255 chars or less). Has a parent relationship with the competency field. Can have multiple children. Ability to have more than one process parent is TBD. Has a child relationship with the process field. The task statement should also include an action verb as tasks are actions. Tasks are broad enough to include multiple competencies but fit well into one of the core processes found in the site life-cycle.

Process field - should be a shorter statement (255 chars or less). Has a parent relationship with the task field. Can have more than one task child. Processes are high level and often represent a phase in a site life-cycle or a major effort within a phase.

Phase field (?optional?) - this might be overkill but it would simply represent work performed pre-launch versus post-launch.

Outbound 'feed' - the repository should allow other sites to pull a copy of the competencies, tasks, and processes into their site. The result of the pull should process something (terms, nodes, whatever), that can be mapped to learning experience nodes in their site. The learning experience nodes can be a registration form, a product description page, a video, whatever.

Inbound 'feed' - the repository could also allow sites to register their competency map/feeds (something part of the module they put on their site). From the repository site, people could look up a competency and see who has registered their learning experience product with that competency.

Competency Mapping Module

My thoughts on the competency-to-product mapping process. This is the module sites install so that their visitors can see which learning experience product meets the competency.

Requirement Specs: Again, assuming all the repository makes sense, the "user" side of this project would need the following.

Competency map field - a field that is pre-populated with the competencies from the repository. The field could be assigned to any content type. D6 version would require CCK. A D7 version would obviously work differently.

Views integration - the competencies, tasks, process, and phases(?) and their relationships(?) would be available to views so users could present their learning experienced grouped by competency in a block or page.

Inbound feed - pre-defined admin option that allows users of the module to sync their copy of the competency repository with the actual repository.

Outbound feed - pre-defined view feed that pushes the learning experience node(?) info, URL, and competency back to the learning experience list in the repository.

Implementation

I could easily see this as an architecture:

• A taxonomy vocabulary for the the competencies
• A content type for the competencies
• Taxonomy manager for maintianing the taxonomy
• Taxonomy xml for importing/exporting terms
• Other common drupal vocabs for tagging purposes

On the issue of merging the vocabulary with existing versions of the vocab on other sites, I think a patch to taxonomy xml that allows it to merge with existing vocabs would take care of the issue.

LMS (learning management system)

I'm pleased to announce the third developer release of Eduglu. Download it at http://eduglu.com/download-eduglu

The big addition to this release is a new site-wide dashboard that is customizable by site admins. This will help learners see at a glance what's happening on the site. Future releases will bring group dashboards as well as the ability for users to customize the dashboard(s) to meet their needs.

Also, many bugs were squashed as we prepare for our first beta later this year.

If you have feedback or find bugs, join us in the Drupal.org issue queue at drupal.org/project/eduglu and at the community.eduglu.org site.

If you're upgrading from an earlier version of Eduglu:
* Run updates at update.php
* Revert all features at admin/build/features
* Clear the cache.

Drupal in Education

Vertical Health Web Developer - Drupal/PHP (Montclair NJ) Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Not allowed

Vertical Health is seeking a full-time, mid-level, PHP developer with a decent understanding of Drupal to join a small team of dedicated web designers and developers, and help write and maintain custom code for several educational and community based, health care focused websites.

We use Drupal for many of our projects, so we prefer that you have a decent understanding of it.
Although we are willing to train the right person with decent PHP chops.

We are located in Montclair NJ, walking distance from the NJ Transit Train Station.

Competitive salary and benefits. This is an on-site position.

Contact me: jobs [at] verticalhealth.com

Thanks,

-Joe

New Jersey

Bentley University Drupal Developer Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Not allowed

The Bentley University Department of Web Services is seeking a qualified, full-time web developer. Demonstrable Drupal experience is a must!

Duties Include:

Leveraging Drupal to maintain and build web sites, pages, themes, page elements, landing pages, XML documents, RSS feeds, banners, and other types of content as needed.

~Working with the lead web developer to support and extend existing Drupal architecture.

~Develop custom theme work with Drupal.

~Evaluating and deploying Drupal modules with a solid understanding of the framework, coding best-practices, and the Drupal community.

~ Developing custom Drupal modules in PHP that integrate with existing modules.

~ Supporting, maintaining, and administering our existing Drupal sites.

SITE DEVELOPMENT

~Translating design comps into HTML/XHTML pages and/or Drupal themes.

~Diagnosing and fixing bugs, and edit design and editorial components as necessary.

~Other tasks as assigned, including: server administration, project management, and team development.

~Providing support, training, and documentation for clients, team members, and colleagues.

TEAM COLLABORATION

~Collaborating creatively with the web team and the lead architect.

~Implementing technical best practices for development, code quality, QA and site testing.

~Communicating clearly with both the web team and nontechnical staff members.

CLIENT COLLABORATION

~Collaborating and communicating with clients and managers clearly, insightfully, and professionally.

~Consulting with internal clients to gather requirements, develop specifications, iterate designs, receive feedback.

~Parsing raw project requirements into phased milestones, time estimates, and clear schedules that balance relative feature value, resource costs, and quick wins.

~Helping clients to shape their requirements and then translate those needs into realistic project plans where client expectations are in sync with the web group's capabilities and priorities.

https://jobs.bentley.edu/applicants/jsp/shared/frameset/Frameset.jsp?time=127896... Drupal in Education

I'd like to get some feedback on a few ideas for federating identity in the research and education spheres and Drupal's role in it. On the surface, Drupal should be the ideal platform with RDF and OpenID in core but I haven't seen the notion of federation discussed much. I think this could be of interest to the curriculum and training community who often have to deal with the consequences of silos.

Here's my outline of how I think the education and academic communities could benefit from federation http://researchity.net/2010/07/08/federated-academic-identity.

Research and academia

I'm working on a drupal project for Individualized Educational Program (IEPs) that relies on our state learning standards. Our state is considering implementing the Common Core State Standards (http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards/) and I need xml, csv, or other structured format besides the pdfs on http://www.corestandards.org to update our drupal module.

Thanks for any help on this.

Drupal in Education

GoingOn Senior Drupal Developer Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Allowed

GoingOn is bringing online social collaboration to universities through a Drupal-based platform. Our goal is to deliver the best collaboration tools for classroom education. In order to meet that goal, we need a world class development team.

Our product strives to extend upon the Drupal WayTM and uses many of the techniques and approaches that the Drupal community uses in Drupal core and contrib modules. The product is composed of contributed modules, custom modules built in a generalized, repurposable fashion, and modules that store the configuration for our specific use cases. We develop purely in an "everything in code" fashion, and take liberal advantage of exportables and hooks.

Maintaining a close relationship with the Drupal community is important to us, so we strive to contribute to its health and vibrancy. We contribute bug fixes and enhancements whenever we find them and collaborate freely with other Drupal developers when opportunities arise.

We need developers who would create a module for fun and throw it up on github before lunch. The type of person who would go to Drupalcon and stay up until 3am with a couple newly found friends and build a "Who's your daddy?" module. We need a developer who will do everything in their power to never, ever harm a kitten, but is excited about pushing the edge of what is possible with Drupal.

The day-to-day life of a developer on our team involves creating new communication features for our communities, student evaluation tools for teachers, and improving our product's extensibility. We use an iterative development process, Git for version control and Trac for our wiki, ticket tracking and milestone management.

This position is contract to hire, with compensation commensurate with experience.

The Candidate

Here are the qualifications we are looking for:

Required Qualifications

• Strong Drupal module building skills
• Experience both implementing and invoking hooks
• Experience with version control systems
• Follows the Drupal community
• High standards for code quality and attention to detail
• Effective communicator of ideas and isn’t afraid of the dry erase board
• A strong desire to work closely with others
• Fast learner and agile

Desired Experience (not required)

• Features, Spaces and Organic Groups modules
• "Everything in code" Drupal development method
• Git
• Trac, or other issue tracking systems
• Experience with iterative-based development processes
• SaaS experience
• Education industry experience

We prefer candidates who will be on-site in our SOMA-based San Francisco office. However, we will consider candidates who have demonstrated strong telecommuting skills.

The Company

GoingOn is developing a social learning solution that leverages the techniques and technologies of the "social web" to change the way that online education is delivered. We have been around since 2007, and our clients include universities, publishing companies, and private education firms.

We are a startup that has entered into growth mode, and we need smart people who know how to make things happen in an emerging market. If you do not have the conviction necessary to be at a startup, if you are not inspired by the power of the social web, or if you are not passionate about education, you need not apply. However, if you want to join a great collaborative team, contribute at the ground floor, and be instrumental in propelling a early-revenue stage company forward, then you may not find a better opportunity.

We don't necessarily live to work, but we work hard to create success. That means having a positive and inspiring work environment that allows everyone to play his or her part. Here are a few qualities that we expect from everyone on our team:

• Be a good person who is ethical and forthright
• Be trustful, truthful, and reliable
• Be passionate, driven, and unafraid
• Be really smart and make it happen
• Be creative and not always right
• Recognize that it takes all types and know that you are not "all types"

Getting the right person to fit in our team is very important to us. We understand that a good work environment is an important part of ensuring we deliver a great product. We want not only smart people to join our team, but also people who will value all team members and continue to participate in our mutual friendships. We can honestly say that we enjoy coming to work every day simply to see each other and we hope you will be the type of person who will feel that way, too.

To Apply

To apply, please email devjobs@goingon.com and tell us why you think you would be the best candidate for the job. Be sure to include the following in your email:

• Drupal profile
• Personal website (if you have one)
• Code sample (attach the sample, or provide a link) and why you think this code sample is demonstrative of your abilities
• Describe or link to two websites you worked on, and what you did for those websites
• Resume

http://www.goingon.com/ Higher Education

California College of the Arts Web Developer Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Not allowed

California College of the Arts is looking for an experienced Drupal developer to join our team in San Francisco. We are looking for someone with a positive attitude and a great sense of humor, who would enjoy working closely with our large and creative community to build a world class online experience for prospective students. A generalist with a broad understanding of Drupal that stems from past work in both theming and light module development would be ideal. We are a small team that prefers wearing many hats to pigeonholes, so depending on the college's needs and your interests you may find yourself working on a site redesign, writing a glue module, testing Open Atrium as a potential intranet solution, or preparing an upgrade to Drupal 7.

The ideal candidate would:

Have a skilled PHP / LAMPP background
Be comfortable creating modules and custom sites
Bring a polished design sense and intermediate or expert CSS and theming skills
Have used subversion or other version control software
Have an opinion and an interest in the opinions of others

Bonus points for experience working with rich media and CDNs.

For more information and instructions on how to apply, see:

http://www.cca.edu/about/jobs/31470 Drupal in Education

Start:  2010-07-23 (All day) - 2010-07-24 (All day) UTC Drupalcamp or Regional Summit Organizers:  blakehall sreeser jct dmcw

DrupalCamp Wisconsin is back this summer and it's still FREE. Just like last year, Friday will have several sessions on Drupal in Education.

Register now!

Details:
Friday July 23 and Saturday July 24
Rennebohm Hall, University of Wisconsin School of Pharmacy 
777 Highland Avenue, Madison WI, 53705 (Google Map)

Get the details and the latest info at the DrupalCampWI website.

Join other Drupal users, or wannabie Drupal users for 2 days of interesting presentations and discussions.

We'll have experts, we'll have newbies and we'll have everyone in between asking questions.  There will be pre-planned sessions, but there will also be plenty of time and space to create new sessions on the fly.  

There will be plenty of FREE WI-FI. There will be screens, projectors, white boards, physical spaces and food and drinks.  And of course there will be plenty of fellow Drupal users from all walks of life.

What do you want to talk about?  What do you want other folks to talk about?  What do you want to hear or learn or discuss?

Find out on the session proposal page, or propose a session of your own.

Be sure to check the camp website for more details as they become available.

Higher Education

Quiz 4 has now been released! Thanks to all of you who have contributed feature requests, bug reports, patches and more!

Quiz 4 has many use-cases, but we have focused on making Quiz a better e-learning tool. We have a new scoring system, a new multichoice module and a new mode "repeat until correct".

The user experience for Quiz authors have been improved in many ways. It is a lot easier to add questions to a quiz. We have a new manage questions interface and a new fieldset "add to quiz" in the node-forms for each question type. We have also tried to make it easier and faster to create multiple quizzes. All settings have been placed in fieldsets and the author can mark a checkbox to have quiz remember his settings for the next Quiz he creates.

We have a brand new results browser making it a lot easier for authors to handle quiz results. It has six different filters, several sort options and it uses ajax to update the results table.

There is a new question type called scale. Scale is a first step towards making quiz a survey tool. We still needs to add better result statistics in order to make full use of the scale module, but it can be nice to add a scale question to your quizzes in order to get feedback on your courses.

We have added support for the wysiwyg module, and we've made it easier to use wysiwyg editors in the multichoice alternatives as well as in questions of all types.

All the reported bugs in Quiz 3 have been fixed, and we will try to keep the response time on important bug reports low. A lot of non reported stability problems have also been fixed, and we hope that Quiz 4 will provide a good and stable user experience.

Quiz 4 is far from perfect. There is still a lot of things we want to do with it. We hope we'll get financing to add better statistics, new question types, better apis, refactoring the code, improved interface for manually scoring questions, better looking default theme, support for having multiple questions on one page, the list is long...

But we think Quiz 4 is a step in the right direction, and hope it will be used on many L(C)MS sites in the future!

About Quiz

The Quiz module provides tools for authoring and administering quizzes through Drupal. A Quiz is given as a series of questions, with only one question appearing per page. Scores are then stored in the database.

This module provides tools for

• Online courses (Audio and Video enabled)
• Self-learning programs
• Training programs
• Supplementary classroom activites

All feedback is appreciated!

LMS (learning management system)

Penn State Multimedia Specialist (Web Communications Specialist) Employment type:  Full time Telecommute:  Not allowed

This job is based out of the College of Arts & Architecture

Here's the brief --

Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture is seeking a Web Communications Specialist to develop, implement and maintain visionary, high-impact Web pages for the College and academic units. This individual will coordinate both internal and external online design and development resources and staff. The job will oversee Website content, architecture and navigation; specialized implementation; compliance with Penn State Web policies, accessibility, and other standards - with an emphasis on Drupal (the college content management system), online branding and marketing goals; search engine optimization; emerging technologies; policies and best practices; and benchmarking using Web analytics tools. This individual will represent the College and serve as liaison on various communication and College/University committees, as well as with clients. The individual will be required to facilitate effective communication of the unit’s mission, strategies, services, processes, and accomplishments both internally and to clients, as well as build a shared vision and support around online communications across the College units. Supervision of staff may also be included in responsibilities. The successful candidate will report to the Director of Alumni Relations and Communications. This job will be filled as a level 3 or level 4, depending upon the successful candidate’s education and experience. Typically requires Bachelor’s degree in information technology/communication or related field plus four years of related experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience for a level 3. Additional experience and/or education and competencies are required for higher level jobs. Requires a thorough understanding of Web standards; strong knowledge of front-end Web development technology; Web content management frameworks (preferably Drupal), and demonstrated understanding of design techniques and standards as they apply to interface design. Must have excellent team and problem solving skills as well as demonstrated fluency with social media. Expert knowledge of Web technologies, standards, cross-browser and platform issues, and CSS-driven layouts, navigation and Web production is preferred. Demonstrated experience in CSS, PHP, jQuery, and My SQI is desired. The successful candidate should exhibit excellent communication, organizational, and project management skills, as well as demonstrate a dedication to quality and customer service. An individual with experience in art and/or design is preferred. This is a fixed-term appointment funded for one year from date of hire with excellent possibility of re-funding.

http://psu.jobs/Search/Opportunities.html Higher Education

Hey folks in K-12 land (especially to the ones in small independent schools):

A quick update on the current status of CiviSchool:

1. We are rolling out an online form process where parents can maintain and update information on their kid (household, emergency, medical, releases etc). A detailed blog post and screenshots is here: http://civicrm.org/blogs/lobo/civischool-online-forms-update-student-fam...

2. We've figured out a way to sync CiviCRM and PowerSchool (via autocomm). We'll use it to also load all the family information collected by Drupal/CiviCRM into PowerSchool

3. Our extended care management, attendance and billing system worked really well this spring semester. It is part of the CiviSchool module

4. The Parent Teacher Conference system worked great and saved a lot of phone calls / manual process.

5. Ideal school of manhattan (http://www.theidealschool.org/) is contributing an application form process to CiviSchool

Detailed blog post on various features of CiviSchool here: http://civicrm.org/taxonomy/term/26

Documentation on installing CiviSchool (on top of Drupal and CiviCRM here): http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/CiviSchool

We currently have 3 other schools in various stages of installing it. There are still a few pieces which are specific to SFS (The San Francisco School), but we do hope to eliminate and generalize things as the module gets deployed in other schools

We also have a mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/civischool for discussion on the module

lobo

Drupal in Education

Some food for thought -- Home Box is an incredibly easy to configure Dashboard creation module. I'm only posting here because I think this could be a great landing page for Drupal as an LMS. Anything that's a block can show up in a homebox display and it seems very flexible / stable from my early usage of it. You can also make multiple dashboards (different one for students vs. instructors vs. admin staff).

I'm going to be integrating it into the default module set that runs with ELMS so that students can see how far along they are in a course, what pages they've book marked, where they left sticky notes, where they last left off, course announcements, and what assignments they've submitted. Thank goodness for Views-block integration :) we can pretty much put out anything we want to the display and the roadmap for version 2 sounds really promising as well.

Linkage: http://drupal.org/project/homebox

Higher Education

Imagine Drupal as a template which you can reuse over and over again. Building Drupal sites have never been more fun especially when it comes to using those over 4000 contributed modules. You will find out building Drupal websites is just about code reuse - polymorphism.

So, have you ever built a second Drupal website and you find out that it is stress-free? How? So, on your first Drupal site, you created node types, created regions, created blocks, created styles for your regions and blocks, created custom fields using CCK, and created views. In views, you created tabs, slideshows, panel displays, tables, grid layouts, exposed filters, interactive node operations and paginated your views and nodes. You also went further to trigger actions, send emails based on user actions, automatically perform actions based on specific rules.

Now tell me, if you need to build your second website which you are highly optimistic about, do you have to spend 2-3 months which you spent on your first Drupal site on your second? Of course not.

So somebody tell me, if I can have a professional Drupal site setup in 3 weeks (definitely a pro by now), why would I ever want to build a static site. Hell no!

So assuming I have a theme already with all the regions dissected, if in my theme there's a tab, how can I make a tab in Drupal.
Ans: use views tab or quicktab module.

My designer created a fancy image which he wants in a slideshow, how can I achieve this in Drupal.
Ans: Use views slideshow or ddblock module

I'm really confused, how can I embed a table in a node or create a table in a block.
Ans: Use views with a table style

I need to categorize my site so that users can navigate and find content easily.
Ans: Use taxonomy module to term your nodes

How can I create forms on my Drupal site
Ans: CCK or field module. You can also use Webform

I want to create rounded corners for the layout of the site.
Ans: Use panels module or just do it at theme level

I want to be able to create a custom search form with custom criteria for users to filter from
Ans: Create the fields using CCK module then expose the fields using views exposed filter.

How do I build charts in Drupal
Ans: Fusion charts module

But if you've searched through the entire d.o and you didn't find what you need, you can start from the following links;
1. Module developer's guide
2. Getting Started Drupal 6 Module Development
3. Creating modules

And if getting started is proving difficult, you can post your questions here, we'll be glad to help.

Nigeria

I am working bringing and old drupal site up to date and replacing the current course database from something made in Visual Basic to something in Drupal.

I have created a content type with a bunch of CCK and taxonomy to categorise the course but I am having some troubles and I am hoping I can get some feedback on best practices to creating an online course database. Some of the problems I am having:

1. The same class can be offered by distance, intensive (1 week long) or standard semester. Do I create three different nodes, one for each time the class is offered?
2. How can I let someone add the class offered as "fall 2010" and then convert that to timestamps of a beginning and an end?
3. What is the best way to setup the class times so they can be displayed on a calendar (recurring dates and Date module?)

I have created a content type for courses but I am running into problems pulling data from views, not using real dates for class start and end times or actual class times and it's all just giving me a lot of headaches and I know there must be a better way!

Help is appreciated!

Drupal in Education

Hey Everyone,
The second release of Eduglu is out. I've squashed quite a few bugs so installation and the initial setup should be much smoother now. The other highlight of this release was the upgrade to Spaces 3 & Context 3.

Read more about the release at http://kyle.mathews2000.com/blog/2010/06/01/second-release-eduglu

Download it at: http://eduglu.com

Leave feedback at http://community.eduglu.org or through my contact form at http://kyle.mathews2000.com/contact

Enjoy!

LMS (learning management system)