Hi,
I just joined this group to try to get more information about using Drupal for our website. We are trying to decide on a CMS, and I am trying to get insights into time committment and ease of use. The site is for Arapahoe Community College near Denver, CO. We have two technical staff who will be administering the site, myself (half-time) and a full-time webmaster.
We are having a new site designed for us, but we need to pick a CMS. Drupal is one of 3 contenders. The others are high-priced commercial systems - Omni-Update and Ingeniux. These were selected as having all of the functionality we need, but we are trying to determine how easy they are to use, and how much of a time committment there will be on our part, compared to each other. We are also looking at 508 compatibility and security. If anyone is familiar with all 3, and has any input, that would be great.
I have never used Drupal, and have minimal experience with CMS in general, but have used other open-source programs (non-CMS) and I know PHP. We have seen a demo of Drupal and I have done a bit of research. We like the "price" of Drupal, but our concern is, with our small staff, will it take too much time to administer compared to the others. My feeling from my research so far, that there will be extra time needed initially, but after that it will be similar to the others, and ease of use would not be a big difference.
Also, I have seen the list in this group of higher education institutions using Drupal. Does anyone have specific contacts for any of these, and is anyone aware of community colleges using Drupal?
Thanks for any help.
Howard
Comments
cost areas
Why not break this decision down by cost centres? You're partially along that path already:
1) the cost of software: Drupal wins hands down.
2) the cost of visual design, site strategy: the same regardless of what path you take.
3) the cost of preparing custom templates (html, css and the CMS templates). To a certain extent coding is coding, assuming all the systems are standards-based and relatively modern in their approach. Get the competing vendors to provide you with a quotation for this aspect and try one of the many Drupal shops to do the same for Drupal. My team's experience with building Drupal sites is that we can do it as quickly, usually more quickly, than any other system.
4) the cost of installing and configuring the application. Again, our team's experience is that we can install and configure Drupal very, very quickly. Add the ease of installing and implementing a theme and this part of the process becomes painless and cost effective. We have sites developed using earlier versions of Drupal that are still running without a hitch some 5 years after launch.
Have a look at this article suggested by Bill FitzGerald: http://buytaert.net/many-universities-use-drupal to see the benefits of Drupal in a post-secondary environment.
And, for your final question, yes, I teach at a community college and have used Drupal to teach my courses there. My team has also installed several Drupal departmental sites for a neighbouring university. Drop me a line if you like.
For me we chose drupal
For me we chose drupal because of the multisite handling. We have about 75 sites all running on the same codebase. I am the sole developer/themer for these sites. The fact that I can handle this is more of a testament of drupal than myself.
One thing that we never wanted to do was go with a proprietary system. We knew there would be things we would need that I would have to code myself. Proprietary systems do not provide the flexibility we need. So our other choice was Joomla. I had already known joomla before having to do the research comparing the two, so that was my front runner. After doing the research I recommended we go with Drupal and I haven't regretted it since. When looking at OS software the true measure is it's community. The support in the Drupal community far exceeds others and it was a big factor in our decision.
As far as 508 compliance is concerned it's usually as good as your users. But this recent post looks interesting http://groups.drupal.org/node/22278
If you have any other questions I would be happy to answer them.
Adam Moore
University of California, Merced
Thank you
Thank you for your responses. They are very helpful. We are still in the decision making process, although I have liked what I have heard about Drupal. Without ever having used any of the CMS on our short list, it is a hard decision. One of my concerns, or questions, is why are there so many more community colleges using Omni-Update than Drupal? Is it that they have no experience with Drupal or open-source and are afraid of it? Do they feel that they don't have enough staff to administer it?
Thanks again.
Look up Steve Recker. He
Look up Steve Recker. He works for Haggerstown CC and is working on a big Drupal implementation. http://www.hagerstowncc.edu/
This site isn't Drupal but he's been working on one for awhile and it's really nice looking (can't find the link unfortunately, ask him for it)
"Plaguing the world with Drupal; One Plone, Moodle, Wordpress, Joomla user at a time since 2005." ~ btopro
http://elearning.psu.edu/
http://elearning.psu.edu/projects/
http://elearning.psu.edu/drupalineducation/
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
What was your decision? We're also comparing Drupal w/ OU Campus
I also work for a community college. We are a team of 3 and have been using OU Campus for a few years now. We have gotten to a point that we want to do so much but feel so limited. It appears very clunky in that the data is not database driven and the back end is puzzled together with various xsl stylesheets.
Essentially the workflow is:
1. develop a default xsl that contains a header, footer and anything else that doesn't change page-to-page.
2. create xsl stylesheets for different layouts you might have; one column, two column etc.
3. Create a template control file (tcf) that allows users to create pages using a form.
The layout stylesheets get pulled in to the default xsl once a choose statement determines which one to use. Then altogether the default and layout stylesheets create individual static pages. If you make a change to your default xsl you must republish the entire site for it to take affect on all pages. Even worse is if you change one of your template control files, that change only takes affect on newly created pages. It was fun to learn and create the templates, but very clunky to maintain. Also added features typically cost more money.
So we are actually in the market of moving to Drupal but was quite curious to know what decision you made for your college and are you happy with your decision?
P.S. I have a theory why community colleges heavily use OU Campus and not Drupal. Community Colleges typically have less people on their web team than Universities and/or larger organizations. Meaning the chances of one of them knowing about Drupal decreases dramatically. Especially since OU Campus is a pay for product which means their sales reps are actively reaching out to these colleges. I've also learned that it is difficult to promote Open Source to those who don't understand Open Source. For some reason they feel if its free, it isn't good.
Why GW Selected Drupal
George Washington University needed to replace a top-dollar, best-of-breed CMS that just did not fit in the higher education environment of silos and department and division freedom. We looked at a number of commercial products that have better adoption in the higher education space, including OU Campus, and presented a commercial and an open source option to the university leadership. I basically explained the difference to them like it was going out for dinner to a restaurant and having the meal prepared for you, brought to you and your table cleared versus going to a grocery store and picking out items and going home and preparing them for yourself, serving yourself and cleaning up after yourself.
It was a matter of a sooner implementation on a commercial product for X number of dollars or take those dollars and build out an open source solution that better matched the requirements of the university.
In the end, we selected Drupal and I pushed Drupal 7 as the solution. We developed out in-house with some support from Chapter Three and have developed an Installation Profile that allows us to provision a site for an office or department in minutes so they can get started with content entry. We manage the selection of modules and roll them out as packages to all sites in our centrally-managed environment. Site administrators can turn modules on and off and make some configuration adjustments, but they are not able to install their own modules to maintain the integrity of the central product.
We are extremely happy with the decision to go with Drupal. The number of people I need to maintain the CMS is dramatically smaller than the Cadillac commercial product we had before, the colleges and schools that abandoned the central CMS before are coming back to the central unit and we have over 150 offices and departments either fully running or in the middle of entering content in our environment.
Modules
Here is a great post about some modules within Drupal that really support an education environment:
http://blog.navigationarts.com/drupal-modules-for-higher-education/