Introducing Julio

Posted March 5th, 2012 by Bill

Looking for a website for your school or department? Meet Julio.

Features include:

Blogs/Announcements;
Slideshows;
Calendars;
Configurable home page layouts;
Simple install process;
Fully configured text editor;
Simple media handling;
Flexible menus, customizable within sections;
Easy modifications to selected theme options;
The ability to delegate editorial control over sections, and pages within those sections;
And more!

Available now, and always, for free: https://drupal.org/project/julio

Credits: Music in the video from Ludvig Franzén: http://soundcloud.com/ludvigfranzen/live Used with permission from the author.

Bill's blog

Comments

Very nice! Looks like a very

Submitted on March 5th, 2012 by Cameron Eagans (cweagans)

Very nice! Looks like a very well done distro! A team and I did a school intranet this last weekend for a coding competition. We'll be releasing it shortly, so between Julio and Learning Assistant, you're all set!

I really like what you have done

Submitted on March 5th, 2012 by JSCSJSCS

Can't wait to dissect it and learn some new things!

Thanks -

Submitted on March 6th, 2012 by Bill

@cweagans - Look forward to learning more about the Learning Assistant.

@jscsjscs - please, dissect away! And, if you want to add in documentation, we are centralizing all this work on d.o in the issue queue.

Looks great

Submitted on March 6th, 2012 by Richard Kassissieh

This look very promising. What would you tell a school that is wondering how it might organize staff support for such an installation, beyond submitting questions to the issue queue?

The issue queue is not a place for general staff :)

Submitted on March 6th, 2012 by Bill

Hello, Richard,

The issue queue on d.o is definitely not the place for staff support - it's a great organizational tool for people working on the distro (ie, helping with documentation, reporting any technical issues they see on an install, etc).

But, for general end users (aka, content maintainer/creator type folks) that would be best handled via a train the trainer model, where a small number of people in the school get up to speed with how to work in the site, and they can disseminate that knowledge to their colleagues.

One of the things on our roadmap between the current dev release and a point release is getting end user documentation in place (how to add a club, how to modify a menu, etc) - this documentation will live as a resource on d.o, but it also can be taken (once it exists :) ) and used as the basis of support documentation within a school.

From your perspective, what would schools need to be successful in implementing something like this?

Very Cool

Submitted on March 6th, 2012 by Mark Bistline

Hi Bill,

Really good looking distribution. There is considerable need for something like this--it's been a topic of discussion here for some time and we're looking forward to spending some time with you in Denver.

Looks fantastic

Submitted on March 8th, 2012 by Geoff Hankerson

I think there is an audience for this distro beyond schools. Nice work!

What if you're already using Drupal?

Submitted on March 10th, 2012 by Gerardo Capiel

Can you describe all the modules and other components you are using, so we could extend an existing Drupal install the same way?

Module list on the release page

Submitted on March 10th, 2012 by Bill

You can get a full list of the modules used and all third party libraries from the release page at https://drupal.org/node/1463472

Julio is built in D7, and everything we used is freely available either with the distribution or the contrib modules we used.

Thanks for this!

Submitted on March 15th, 2012 by medios

You have done an amazing job building this distro, the theme looks so beautiful and professional, and the admin interface is very usable. I think this is a very good solution for many schools who doesn't have an IT expert onboard. This proves Drupal rocks!.

Looks great well done

Submitted on March 16th, 2012 by Gregg Coppen

So pleased to see this in the wild - seems like a logical culmination of all the great work funny monkey has done with Drupal in the education field. Well done and cant wait to try it out.

Looks awesome, but Dl doesnt

Submitted on March 22nd, 2012 by DoktorBaer

Looks awesome, but Dl doesnt work...always page 404 error on https://drupal.org/project/julio

Not seeing this

Submitted on March 22nd, 2012 by Bill

I just downloaded the project off the project page, and off the release node, and had no issues.

And, I did it on really flaky hotel wireless :)

If this is something that you see again, please add it as an issue at https://drupal.org/project/issues/julio

Please include the time of day, the browser you are using, any error message you see, and information about how you are connecting to the internet.

Thanks!

Any demo sites?

Submitted on April 4th, 2012 by Diane Loomis

This looks great - I work for a public K-12 school district and we are just getting ready to launch a site in drupal using a distribution designed for government, so it has required a lot of customization. Is this distribution intended for individual school sites or a district that wants a district site then using OG for individual school pages? Also, is there a demo site online anywhere to take a closer look? Thanks!

Either of these use cases could be supported

Submitted on April 4th, 2012 by Bill

Julio could be used to support individual school sites within a district, or a central district site that created individual pages for schools. The direction you went would be determined by how the district and schools are staffed, and by the needs of the schools within the district.

Generally, using separate sites for each school will provide individual schools with more flexibility, but depending on the size of the district having sites for each school this could put a support burden on staff if the sites were all managed by district personnel.

At this point, we do not have a demo site up and running.

Admin login

Submitted on April 20th, 2012 by Andrew

Hi.

Having just installed Julio in AWS to evaluate, I logged out from the Drupal admin account and now can't seem to get back in using the Drupal normal login process - domain.com/?=user/login.

Being new to this, is there something I'm missing?

Thanks.

Password reset?

Submitted on April 20th, 2012 by Bill

Julio doesn't change how people log in.

As part of the install process with Julio, you created two accounts: UID1, and then a second superuser account. We recommend using the second account for the day to day work in the site, and only using UID1 for module upgrades and other higher-level maintenance tasks.

In short, do a password reset for either account, and you should be able to see the login page by navigating to /user when logged out.

Three questions about Julio!

Submitted on April 25th, 2012 by Raul Carvalho

Hello. I'm looking for a CMS solution to apply to my class on our university graduation on Psychology. Our intention is to have a place to plan events, organize groups and share all our documents, seminars, questions and etc, separated by disciplines. From what I saw in the promo video and by reading the details about the project, Julio seems to be a good option for us - except for the forum part - but I still have some points that needs to be clarified before trying it:

1 - Does Julio supports the installation of a forum module, without much effort, specially when talking about future updates, both in the module itself as in the distro?

2 - Does this distro supports the upload of any file type, including pdf, docx and etc?

3 - Does this distro supports localization by the installation of localization modules(or patches, I don't know the term applied to Drupal), or I must translate it module by module? (The language is Brazilian Portuguese)

Best Regards,

Thanks! :)

Some thoughts/responses

Submitted on May 4th, 2012 by Bill

RE the forum module, that could be done, but the base functionality of Julio is designed to support a public-facing web site. Introducing a forum, while it is technically possible, introduces the possibility of an additional type of user: a forum participant that could only participate on one specific section of the site.

However, given that Julio is already built to support groups (as each section of the site is actually its own group/area) the foundation is there.

RE file uploads, the types of files that can be uploaded can be extended as needed. The defaults support both pdf and docx, among others.

RE localization, Julio is built on Drupal, and the core multi-lingual capabilities of Drupal can be extended using https://drupal.org/project/i18n

forum

Submitted on June 2nd, 2012 by Peter

If you download and enable the admin_menu module

(drush dl admin_menu
drush en admin_menu)

You can do whatever you want, like activating the core forum module. In this way you can use a distribution as a starting point for developing your own site without the limitations of the distribution.

Julio vs. Open Academy

Submitted on May 15th, 2012 by Amenity

Hi Bill,

Thanks so much for the fantastic distribution. How would you recommend I evaluate it in comparison to Open Academy?

Julio and Open Academy do different things

Submitted on May 15th, 2012 by Bill

I'd start by comparing the goals you would like to achieve, and seeing which distribution came closer to meeting those needs.

download

Submitted on May 21st, 2012 by Animal

I am having trouble downloading from the drupal site, http://drupal.org/project/julio .
I have tried from both Chrome and IE and both give me either a "not found" or 404 page.
I have tried this from work and from home and neither works.

Download link now working

Submitted on May 23rd, 2012 by Bill

Hello,

The download link is now working.

The downloads have intermittently been interrupted due to this issue: https://drupal.org/node/1472052

Sorry for the hassle.

Motivated

Submitted on June 29th, 2012 by Baqar

Well after viewing this i am motivated to use Julio. I have deleted the current site look and working on Julio. Hope support is as good as this Video.

See

Submitted on June 29th, 2012 by Bill

See http://funnymonkey.com/julio-documentation-demo-support for more ways to connect with different options for support.

Events

Submitted on July 21st, 2012 by Neil

Thank you for Julio - it's very impressive and it's ease of use is great for the .edu install we're looking at

Is it possible to configure other admin menu options like Structure/Configuration/Reports etc?

Are there options for importing existing events into the calendar (sorry couldn't find in docs)

Thanks again Bill, well done

The admin menu can be

Submitted on July 22nd, 2012 by Bill

The admin menu can be configured; we hide the options from most users to prevent them from making changes that will interfere with the smooth running of the site.

For importing calendar events, I'd look at the options provided by the feeds module.

Unfortunately, the dedicated ical parser has not been updated to D7, but I would be surprised if events couldn't be imported using standard feeds options.

Although, I have yet to try this myself.