As of December 2016, the GPS Lab website is state-of-the-art in terms of current website development and deployment. The site was implemented using a website content management system (CMS) called Drupal.
Content management systems typically separate site content from display and delivery. The content is stored in a hierarchical tree of data blocks, called “nodes”—essentially a database—and each node includes display parameters that determine its importance and position on the webpage where the block appears. This separation of content and display attributes enables the site to be “mobile-responsive,” meaning that the content blocks on each site page reformat on the fly to fit the screen size and aspect ratio of whatever device the site is being viewed on—computer screen, tablet, smart phone, etc.
Drupal is an “open source” content management system, meaning that people and institutions worldwide, including Stanford, participate in its development and evolution. Open source software is made available without charge to anyone wishing to use it.
Unlike “old fashioned” websites in which you would typically use an external HTML/CSS editing program such as Adobe Dreamweaver to create web pages locally and then upload them to a web server, the Drupal CMS contains built-in site/page editing tools.
While it is still possible to prepare content using external editing tools, any text you create with external tools will need to be copied from the creation tool and pasted into a Drupal text entry “form” on a given page. Likewise, you may create/process images/photos using external image editing tools, but the processed image/photo will then need to be uploaded to the page where it will be displayed using Drupal’s image upload interface.
You can think of Drupal as a Web application that has a “read-only” Display Mode and an interactive Content Editing Mode. In Display Mode, anyone can view all the site’s public pages. There’s no need to Log into Drupal to view the site’s pages; you can simply enter the site’s URL, gps.stanford.edu, and the home page will appear. From there on, you simply use menus, sub-menus and links to navigate around the site—like you would on any website.
However, in order to use the GPS Lab website’s Content Editing Mode, there are two requirements:
By default, Drupal always opens the GPS Lab website In Display Mode. Anyone can view the site in Display Mode. To access the GPS Lab’s Drupal site editing tools, site owners must login to the site with their SUNet ID and password.
When you view the GPS Lab website in your browser—Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple Safari, etc.—you’ll notice that every page in the site has a red stripe across the top the top with Stanford University on the left side of the stripe and SUNetID Login on the right side. To log into the site, simply click the SUNetID Login button, as shown below on the Research Focus page of the GPS Lab site.
When a GPS Lab Site Owner logs into the site with their SUNet ID and password, the site interface changes from Site Display mode to Site Editing mode shown below.
As you can see in the screen shot above, the page changes in four visually distinct ways:
Note: Anyone with a SUNet ID can log into the GPS Lab website by clicking the SuNetID Login button and entering their SUNet ID and password on the SuNet ID Login page. Doing so will cause Drupal to add the user’s SUNet ID to its user database and automatically classify that person as a “SUNet ID User.” However, there will be no visual indication that the SUNet user has logged in. No gray menu bar will appear above the red stripe and no editing tabs will appear below the page title. The GPS Lab website will only display the Drupal editing features shown and noted above to logged in users whose SUNet IDs have been classified as Site Owners in Drupal’s user database.