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Sun 3rd August, 2008. I've devoted a lot of effort over the last few months on trying to learn about the open-source Drupal CMS (Content Management System), which is very powerful although rather obscure. I'm now quite smitten with it, and the more I read about it, and about CMSs in general, the more secure I feel about its future potential. I'm convinced that we can and should use it to drive our new Faculty websites, and I'm determined to prove it if I possibly can by developing a proof-of-concept website over the summer recess (which started a couple of weeks ago). In anticipation of this I managed to get our ICT Dept to agree to set up a new (virtual) web server to support it. This is quite a radical advancement for LSBU, since up until now we have been restricted to having to work with cgiwrap, which prohibited the use of most open source packages. Back in November (2007) I was asked to set up a Faculty-wide social webspace to support the development of the Faculty's new BA Social Technology course. The aim was to enable document uploading and commenting, at least. Ideally within a week! I had set up my own web domain (mebush.net) a little over a year ago so that I could experience working in a professional web hosting environment, because I suspected that it would give me more flexibility than I had on the LSBU web server. I discovered that it was MUCH better! The main thing it allowed me to do was to very easily install open source software packages without worrying about cgiwrap, whether or not I had the right access privileges, whether or not the web server had a recent enough version of the PHP interpreter installed, etc. After chatting at some length with a colleague about the requirements I then went home and worked late into the night. I installed, played with, and uninstalled...
...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 had available I decided to jump to the conclusion that Drupal looked the most promising. There were various factors that made me decide to use Drupal, most of which are described here. The Drupal site I set up to support new BA Social Technology course (using version 5 of Drupal) was quite successful. There were about a dozen users, two of whom I had set up as "content edotors" and the others as "commentators" (these were user types I defined). The content editors were able to edit pages and uploaded text documents without problems, but it became clear to me that allowing users to create new pages is risky. Firstly, it's not abvious how to make the pages appear at an apprpriate place within the navigation menu. Secondly, even if users can do this they may not call the new pages what I would have called them, or put them where I would have put them! Although I was happy that I chose Drupal, I think that probably any of the CMSs listed above - or alternatively a hosted wiki platform such as wikispaces - would also have been quite adequate given the initial requirements. |
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