using drupal for your organizational website (or, how to use drupal without cursing) michelle...
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Using Drupal for Your Organizational Website (or, how to use Drupal without cursing)
Michelle Murrain Nonprofit Open Source InitiativeMetaCentric Technology Advising
Open Source CMS
Content Management Systems manage website (or intranet) content
Open Source Content Management Systems have become one of the real open source success stories
The three most popular open source CMS in the nonprofit sector are: Joomla Drupal Plone
Drupal Drupal is an open source CMS based on
PHP and MySQL It can be installed and run on any server
with Apache, MySQL and PHP (including Linux/UNIX, Windows and Macintosh)
It also runs on PostgreSQL (another open source Database system)
It has an extremely active developer community, with lots of resources available
It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS for nonprofits
Drupal, cont.
Drupal is more developer friendly than it is user friendly (for site building, primarily)
This makes it extremely flexible and powerful It makes it possible for developers to create
feature rich sites It makes it very difficult for nonprofits to build
websites on Drupal on their own (unless they have staff who know it or can learn it.)
However, organizations can maintain Drupal sites quite well once trained
Brief History of Drupal
It was created originally as a bulletin board system, and open sourced in 2001
It has had broad adoption since version 4 It is now on version 6.6 (point upgrades
happen every few months) Version 5.x is also maintained (now at
5.12) Many sites are still built with Drupal 5
because some modules haven't caught up.
Brief Interlude: Drupal vocabulary
Node: a piece of content stored in the database. Basically a page
Content Type: types of content by how they are displayed and organized
Module: an add-on to provide new functionality Theme: a set of templates and stylesheets that
determine the look and feel of the site Permissions: access to specific Drupal content and
features Roles: sets of user permissions Taxonomy: the way Drupal categorizes content Views: ways to customize presentation of content.
Basic Drupal Features Drupal can be used for all sorts of sites
Standard sites, members only sites, blogs, intranets
Has a strength is in community sites – where people can log in and create content
It has blogs and commenting built in Drupal has a granular permissions system It has a robust and flexible theming
system Drupal is modular, and there are tons of
modules available
Basics of Drupal Implementation
Do it yourself? Get help? Once it is set up, administration of a
Drupal site is a lot easier than it used to be
But setting up a Drupal site requires expertise
Requirements for installation of Drupal
It is a web application, so it requires a server running web server software (like apache). Also requires PHP and MySQL (or PostgreSQL)
Can be installed on most standard web hosts. Some have “one click” install of Drupal
Installation of Drupal
Download from http://drupal.org Expand file to a directory in your
webserver that is accessible Set up a new database Go through the installation procedure
Building and Customizing a Drupal Site
Once installed, the Drupal site is very basic
Additions to your Drupal site will be made using themes and modules
Themes Themes change the
look and feel of your site
If you have someone else do your site, they will likely design a custom theme for you
Lots of themes are available at: http://drupal.org/project/Themes
Drupal Modules to use
There are some great modules included in the basic Drupal install that you should use (depending on site function)
Blogging module Comment module Forum Taxonomies (categorizing content) Profile (user profiles)
Modules to add
Drupal out of the box is very basic. You'll almost definitely want to add modules
WYSIWYG editors Content Construction Kit (CCK)
Allows you to add custom fields to a node in Drupal
Views allows for customized view of content –
like pages with particular kinds of categorized content organized in a particular way
Demos
Drupal Resources
htttp://drupal.org - main Drupal website http://drupal.org/forum - forums http://www.lullabot.com/ - podcast,
instructional video, articles, etc. (geared towards developers)