This site has been developed using Drupal - which is an open source content management system (CMS). We'll be publishing more detailed content soon about our decisions for using it for this community - along with some advice for others planning similar work.
A brief summary of why we decided to use Drupal:
- It's open source - we thought it was essential to use an open source application for the site - and, in our opinion Drupal is as good as (if not better) than commercial alternatives
- Functionality - we want to offer site users and community members high level of functionality - for example the ability to post comments, discover other users and submit content. More functions will be switched on as the site develops - and Drupal allows us to do all this without a large amount of development time
- Accessibility standards
- Well supported - and solidly developed. We're using version 5 of Drupal so it is a robust and well tested version. Drupal has an extensive community supporting and developing the software, which means that there are lots of additional plug-ins available to extend the core Drupal site - we're using plug-ins for content creation, tagging content, subscriptions and controlling views of content
- Social networking - an important part of the project is to enable people using the website to discover others who are using or want to use open source in their schools. Drupal allows registered users to view others' profiles. As the site develops we'll be adding more features to allow higher levels of networking on the site.
Please post any comments you have on Drupal - or links to educational sites that are built on Drupal.
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You should also check out the Drupal in Education working group over at groups.drupal.org -- there are a fair number of folks from the UK involved with the group, and it's a good cross-section of folks interested in Open Source, education, and, of course, Drupal.
Also congratulations on the launch -- this is a nice-looking site!
Cheers,
Bill
--
FunnyMonkey -- Tools for Teachers
http://funnymonkey.com
Thanks Bill,
Glad you like the site and thanks for the link to the Drupal Education group.
Drupal users in the UK may also be interested in visiting Drupal UK which organises events in and allows you to find developers and training courses.
Clare
Bill Fitzgerald's (funnymonkey) own new book on Drupal for Learning is worth recommending. Am reading it right now :)
http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-for-education-and-e-learning/book/mid/021008r97i1k
Helen
Helen Whitehead
Editor, Kids on the Net
Thanks! I ordered a copy before starting the redesign, have made extensive use of it, and have recommended it to others in the team here.
Bill's actually the one who introduced me to Drupal in the first place, as my school was looking for a main website that would integrate with Moodle and Elgg at the time he and I were both presenting at the first Elgg conference.
We use Drupal for the INGOT community site alongside Moodle. There is overlap between what Moodle and Drupal can do but overall Moodle is organised for courses that are sequential whereas Moodle is better suited to more arbitrary structures. We have also developed a couple of school web sites in Drupal and host them on the same server as the INGOT sites. The advantage of Drupal for a school web site is that individual departments can easily take rsponsibility for updating their own information so everything doesn't get left to one webmaster who never has time to keep everything up to date. It is also possible to give different access rights so there could be a parents' section only edited by them etc. It is also possible to build e-portfolios directly on Drupal - we give credit to learners who show they have the skills to do this in the Silver INGOT. All of this is without paying a single license fee and only a few hundred pounts a year if you want hosting and support. Open Source can really save money but it has no marketing budget so many people simply don't know about it or get worried by the "you get what you pay for mentality". If that was always true, why bother with tenders and value for money checks ;-). In reality marketing is a huge part of the cost of proprietary software products and in buying them you are largely paying for that marketing effort rather than the technology itself. That is one of the economic reasons why FOSS can thrive without a paid for licensing model.
I have not used drupal for a while. I like drupal a lot, but I preffered to use it with SMF for forums. See http://drupal.org/project/smfforum
Many thanks for the tip. Wow, what a great deal ... I think I'll start hording today.Being new to drupal (d6), I would like to understand how to build community sites using well supported d6 modules to avoid "re-inventing the wheel" with custom hooks.I believe "Using Drupal" promises to review and apply d6 modules to common use-cases with supporting examples along with pros and cons.Unfortunately, I'm getting impatient.