TSHA considering Drupal for major site redesign

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sportch's picture

The Texas State Historical Association, a nonprofit educational organization which recently moved from Austin to Denton (on the UNT campus), is preparing to rebuild their large website which consists of over 200,000 pages, and is visited by millions of people every year. The largest part of the job will be rebuilding the Handbook of Texas Online, which consists of over 25,000 articles on people, places, events, historical themes, institutions, and a host of other topic categories. There are several requirements for this part of the project that can be gone into detail on later.

Other things that need to be migrated are a feature that emails registered users with a story every day of the year about an important historical event that happened on that day, events management, several education programs for teachers and students that are used for programs including Texas History Day and Junior Historians. In addition to this, the TSHA is working with UNT to digitize several out-of-print books along with 100 years (over 55,000 pages) of our scholarly journal, the Southwestern Historical Quarterly and we need to somehow incorporate the results in the site. TSHA also sells over 100 books, so a shopping cart of some sort is needed to replace a very outdated php order form.

Currently the site uses a mixture of Sharepoint, PHP, MySQL, Perl, and some Java. We are looking into monetizing the site and so far have done very well with Adsense but are open to other ideas. Web 2.0 interactivity is also something we'd like included in the new site (RSS, message boards, blogs, etc).

My question is, is this site a good fit for a Drupal project? Also, we need some recommendations for companies in the Metroplex with Drupal experience who could handle a large project like this.
More about us and the web site can be found here: http://www.tshaonline.org/about/welcome/history.html

Comments

Dallas area Drupal shop

joshmccormack's picture

I knew there was a reason I studied history undergrad and moved to the Dallas area to start a Drupal company... :)

Drupal would probably work well for what you're looking to do, and might offer some capabilities you haven't outlined here. Certainly more social network features would get people involved in the history around them. I also think Drupal's powerful taxonomy system could take people from one interesting article to another, linked together by tags in common. If you've ever looked up one thing on Wikipedia and looked up from your screen hours later you know what I mean.

If you'd like to meet up in person let me know. I'm in Allen.

Josh McCormack
Owner, InteractiveQA
Social Network Development & QA testing
josh@interactiveqa.com
http://www.interactiveqa.com
917.620.4902

Josh McCormack
Owner, InteractiveQA
Social Network Development & QA testing
http://www.interactiveqa.com
917.620.4902
AIM:
jmccormciti
Skype:
joshmccormack
Yahoo:
joshmccormack
Google Talk:
joshmccormack@gmail.com
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