The university department is at the center of academic life. All across higher education, tens of thousands of departments have organized themselves to teach courses and perform research. As it turns out, most departments need a website to promote their work and each of those websites is basically the same. Open Academy is an academic departmental website in a box. Built by Pantheon, Chapter Three, and the University of California at Berkeley, we have baked in critical functionality around departmental news, faculty profiles, publications and presentations, events and calendaring, courses, resources and links, video, social media, and degrees and programs. Out of the box, Open Academy lets a department get an amazing and extendible website. As a bonus, Open Academy was built entirely with the Panels module utilizing the In-Place-Editor, pane level fields override, style plugins, layout aware pane displays, and much more. Come see a best practice Panels Drupal Product. This session will be given by Matt Cheney (from Pantheon and Chapter Three) and Brian Wood (from the University of California at Berkeley).

Questions answered by this session:
What should an academic departmental website look like?
How do you use Panels to make a killer product experience?
How do you design a flexible product?
What does an administration interface for a Drupal product look like?
How can higher education benefit from a standard Drupal product?