Drupal for Alton Convent School's Website
Using Drupal and Gallery2, Alton Convent School has provided a portal for the school's extended community to keep up to date with events in school, access the school's prospectus and additional information and browse some of the school's digital photo collection. These open source programs make it possible for a team of staff to share the work of keeping the website up to date.
Alton Convent School is an independent school in Hampshire. The Prep School has 209 boys and girls from 2 ¾ to 11; with the senior school having 280 girls from 11 to 18. There is an overlap of staff between the two schools. Miles Berry is Head of the Prep School and also responsible for the ICT strategy in both schools. He is supported by a full time network manager, David Hicks, who has previous experience of using open source software. In addition, ICT teachers and technically literate teachers play a role in the development and delivery of the ICT strategy and have author and editor privileges on the website. Back in 2002, Miles conducted a study of prep school websites, available online at http://milesberry.net/docs/prep_websites.pdf.
The school sought to develop a website that would form an online hub of the school's extended community of pupils, parents and former pupils as well as forming an effective marketing tool for the school. As a busy school, a regular feed of news and calendar information was important, and the school was also looking to provide controlled access to digital photographs of school events. It was important that the task of creating and editing web content could be distributed across a team.
After pinning down the school's functional requirements through discussions with representative stakeholders, Miles explored the capabilities of a number of content management systems, using the demonstration versions available through http://www.opensourcecms.com/ before settling on Drupal as a stable project that matched the school's requirements most closely.
The school set up its own webserver using a redundant desktop PC, running Apache2, MySQL and PHP5 under Ubuntu Linux. Installing Drupal was easy, simply a case of downloading the package from Drupal's site. Database configuration was relatively straightforward.
Within a couple of days, the school had copied across the content from its old, static website to create a foundation of static pages inside Drupal, with a classification scheme that used both subjects and year-groups to provide miniature 'sites within a site'. The next few weeks involved moving content from other school documents, such as termly newsletters, parents' handbooks and the school calendar over to Drupal. After that, new stories and events are simply added into the database by one of the team of staff with editing privileges, including class teachers, the office manager and the senior school librarian. After exploring the extensive range of themes available for Drupal, Miles settled on 'GoldenGray', with a few modifications, to give a simple, clear-cut design in the school's colours.
Miles installed a number of additional modules to provide a closer match to the school's functional requirements and to use the capabilities of Drupal. These included:
- event : to provide an online calendar of school events, including an ical feed for parents' PDAs
- node_import: to facilitate quick import of events and other items from other systems at the school
- invisimail: to limit spam to published e-mail addresses
- taxonomy menu: to allow users to browse all content relevant to subject areas or phases of the school
- gallery: to provide full integration with gallery2
Gallery2 is a separate set of php scripts with its own MySQL database running on the same webserver. The school uploads digital photographs at full resolution to the webserver, with medium and small resolution copies created automatically. The photos are then organised into albums, with the facility for registered users to download the full size photo for printing at home.
The site now provides a rich range of content about the school. Most obviously, there is a blog style front page, filled with news stories about events throughout the school, updated almost daily by the content team. Additional pages provide a range of static or semi-static factual information for parents, including curriculum guides and school policies, an online copy of the school's prospectus, a 'scrap-book' of examples of pupils’ work, mostly drawn from the English curriculum, much of the school's digital photo collection, and an up-to-date online calendar of forthcoming events. The website averages between 150 and 200 'hits' per day, with visitors viewing an average of four pages per visit.
Drupal has provided the school with an impressive content management system for its public web presence, allowing a team of staff to take charge of creating content for the website without the need for technical expertise. Through choosing a blog style presentation for the front page of the site the school has promoted the site as a communication portal for its parents, friends and former pupils, as well as giving the school a web presence which stands out from the online prospectus approach of many independent schools.
With distributed content creation, one challenge is that of maintaining the site's quality standards. Drupal helpfully provides a list of the most recently edited pages, and several of the school's staff have editing privileges; however, this does not guarantee the level of proof reading associated with the school's printed publicity materials.
Many schools may shy away from making photo collections available online in the way that Alton Convent has, although Miles took care to put a number of copy protection measures in place.
A selection of quotes reveals how various users view the site: "I keep checking back to see what's new." (parent) "I have found Drupal to be user-friendly and easy to navigate." (teacher, content team member) "We felt we knew the school very well already." (prospective parent) "Have you put the trip photos on the website yet?" (pupil) "Parents have access to an outstanding range of information from the school. It has an excellent website." (Independent Schools Inspectorate)
Integrating the school's three web-based platforms, Drupal, Elgg and Moodle would offer some synergies, as would linking with the school's proprietary management information system.
Providing a consistent look and feel between Drupal and the embedded Gallery2 module required some modification of cascading style sheets and php code. The version of the event module used by the school included a bug relating to events in progress, which needed some code modification to fix, although this issue has been eliminated in subsequent releases. Some copy protection measures for photographs also required php code modification. Installing Drupal on the same webserver as was used for Moodle necessitated some alterations to the webserver's settings through .htaccess files.