A website to support the development of BA Social Technology
I was asked to set up a Faculty-wide website to support the development of our new BA Social Technology course. The aim is to enable document uploading and commenting, at least. Ideally within a week! I had set up my own web domain (www.mebush.net - on which this blog is now hosted) a little over a year ago so that I could experience working in a professional web hosting environment. I suspected that it would give me more flexibility than I have on the LSBU web server. I discovered that it's MUCH better! The main thing is that I can now very easily install open source software packages without worrying about whether or not I have the right access privileges, whether or not the web server has a recent enough version of the PHP interpreter installed, etc.After chatting at some length with Xristine about this yesterday afternoon I then went home and worked late into the night. I installed, played with, and uninstalled...
- joomla
- wordpress
- phpwiki
- tikiwiki
- drupal
...and I also read up about them (and a few other alternatives) to get a quick impression of what other users have said about them. Given that I have a fairly basic web hosting package (about £1/week) I could only install one of these packages at a time, which was pretty frustrating! Most of them are very complex packages and it's impossible to assess exactly what each can and can't do without spending a lot more time playing with them. However, given the limited time I have available I decided to jump to the conclusion that Drupal is the most promising, and so I have been working today on setting up a Drupal website for the Course Planning Committee and others to use. There were various factors that made me decide to use Drupal - most of which are described here.
On the other hand, I think that probably any of the above - or alternatively a hosted wiki platform such as www.wikispaces.net - would also have been quite adequate for our purposes.