Nikhef facilitated the graduation of hundreds of PhD students in collaboration with university partners over the past decades. Most of them are employed outside Nikhef and have the Nikhef Alumnus status. The Nikhef management wanted to be able to inform these alumni about the latest news. In the meantime Nikhef wanted to have an overview where and in which sector alumni are working.
Based on these requirements, iDelft has created a proof-of-concept Alumni web portal. The alumni can register and change their profile. A complete alumni database cab be populated which Nikhef employees can manage. The web portal is build in the Open Source Content Management System Drupal. It contains a lot of default functionality that is used for this project.
The first challenge was to allow alumni to change their own profile. A Nikhef employee has to review the new data before it will be saved in the alumni database. In this way, the database is kept clean and correct. A new Drupal module had to be build to provide this functionality.
There was also a requirement to use the existing Nikhef Single Sign-On environment (SSO). Employees of Nikhef must be able to login to the portal using their Single Sign-On account, while alumni must be able to login via the 'normal' portal login screen. With SimpleSAMLphp (a PHP module that implements the SSO SAML technology into PHP), a corresponding Drupal module and some own-written code iDelft successfully made all of this possible.