Ideas for an updated school profile installation

1. All the core stuff, forums, blogs, events, etc.
2. Typical roles for school communities (admin, office, tech, faculty, parent, student, volunteer, alumni)
3. OG for classrooms
4. CCK/Views for custom content types, such as Assignments.
5. Admin menu, tweaked for multiple roles (or the multiple blocks/role method described by dwees)
6. WYSIWYG editor, with some simplified configs
   • Fck Editor
   • TinyMCE editor
   • OpenWYSIWYG
7. "Intranet" section for faculty file repository, private forums, etc.)
8. Multiple, school-oriented themes
9. Several CSS-based themes for teachers to personalize their OG classrooms.
10. Teacher clipart collection. (I know!)
11. Taxonomy categories to define departments, classes, subjects, curriculum descriptions, assignment types, etc.
12. Some standard front end pages with example content, such as "Welcome new families", "How to enroll", "Meet our staff", etc.
13. Some additional features, such as simple galleries and file uploads
14. Multilingual (for example Spanish/English in my area)
15. Administrative features:
    • Resource management
    • Attendance management
    • Gradebook
    • Class schedules

Core features

It is great to have many ideas of possible features to add, but in order to have something simple and well designed from the beginning, why don't we start by implementing the bare minimum first, and test it around before we get carried away and add any more stuff ?
Here's my ideas fore the most essential features we'd need to have :

1. A clear, easy admin page (dashboard) and admin menu for two basic roles : teachers, and admins (headmaster, secretaries, etc.)This was the root of our conversation, and probably the most important feature. This page should probably be devided in several tabs to avoid clutter, and it should include icons that would help users make sense out of it. The most used features should displayed prominently.
2. WYSIWYG editor, with some simplified configs (VERY important to users, especially teachers who design their courses)
3. CCK/Views for custom content types, such as Assignments.

I think these are the 3 core features we should focus on to start with, in order of priority. If you don't think these are the most important for your current project or for school websites in general, please modify the list above.

dwees:

I agree with starting with core features and trying to avoid feature bloat but the intention here is not to compete with the DrupalEd distribution. We'd like to have different features if at all possible, we don't want to end up duplicating a lot of the work that went into that distribution. The only thing the DrupalEd distribution is missing from your core features list is the clear, easy admin page. Maybe if we find an elegant solution to that, we can propose to Bill that he include it in the next release of DrupalEd.

billfitzgerald:

dwees said exactly what I was thinking -- we've been slammed with work, which has prevented me from putting down my thoughts on the D6 version of DrupalEd, but, in a nutshell, our two main goals for it are simplifying the base install and streamlining the UI -- and much of this discussion centers around exactly these two things. So, I'm very open to DrupalEd becoming a community-supported platform, and for these changes to inform what DrupalEd for D6 becomes.

jrDuboc :
Hi there,
as promised, here is a rough model of the kind of stuff I see for a simplified dashboard : http://sandgarden.org/uploads/drupal_dashboard/sketch1_drupal_dashboard....
It is limited in features, on purpose.
The goal is to put all the stuff user actually need the most together at the same place, so we get the simplest interface possible for "basic" users.
Also, I tried to put the most useful things in the first tab.
Everyone is welcome to download the files and modified them, I put them in a .zip file here : http://sandgarden.org/uploads/drupal_dashboard/drupal_dashboard.zip
Don't hesite to critizise it and add your ideas.

dwees:

I like it! I see some minor improvements. For something like the Drupal edit distribution, it would be nice if the content presented for the user to admin was content the user is able to edit. So a teacher could have a similar form, with reduced functionality, a student would have the same form with greatly reduced functionality, etc... Also, we can add tabs, like 'My groups', 'My recent', 'My files', etc...

billfitzgerald: In D6, we can use Views to generate the bulk of these dashboards -- and this is where Views 2's more granular permissions to show/hide views can be put to good use.

dwees:

Yes, Views very good point. Also the Views Bulk Operations module has been updated for Drupal 6, so we can use it as well.