Building a website for physics courses with Drupal

I have been involved in building a new website for the theoretical physics courses at IPhT, using the content management framework Drupal. This post is the story of this experience, written for researchers who are considering embarking in similar projects.

Riccardo Guida and I have been organizing the IPhT courses for years (many years in Riccardo's case), and one year ago we finally decided to escape the IPhT website and set up a dedicated website for the courses. The problem with the IPhT website was that it did not know what a course was. A course was a collection of various objects: a number of "seminars", a "publication" where lecture notes could be stored, a few lines in a list of courses on a static webpage, etc. These objects did not talk to one another, and the same information had to be copy-pasted several times.