K12IT

From day one in my role as Director of Technology I have been frustrated by our district's website.  The website is hosted by Schoolwires, and while it has some nice features and is fairly easy for the end user, it is extremely limiting for anyone who wants to go above and beyond a simple WYSIWYG post.

For example, before my time, the district had a custom front page made by Schoolwires.  We are unable to edit this front page!  That means no current events, no cancellations, and essentially, nothing current!

So why hasn't is changed?  As anyone who works in a school setting knows, things aren't always logical.  The high school budget was responsible for the payment to Schoolwires.  So, while I didn't care for it, it wasn't coming from my budget, hence it was low on my priority list.

Why is it changing now?  You guessed it!  It is now part of my budget, and I cannot justify the thousands of dollars we pay to Schoolwires.

So, I have set out on a quest to develop our district website, using a Content Management System (CMS), so that it is database driven and easily updated by the end user.

One CMS that is popular with schools is Dot Net Nuke .  While I have heard very good things regarding this CMS, it is based on ASP scripting and my experience is with PHP scripting.

After evaluating a couple of different options, including Wordpress, ModX, and Joomla, I decided to settle on Drupal.

While the other CMSs do this to some extent, I felt Drupal best met my objectives of being:

• written in php
• actively being developed
• a K-12 Community
• plethora of modules (that are actively developed)
• database driven (MySQL)
• Open for a hard core developer
• Once configured, and easy interface for the end user

As I move forward with this process, I plan to blog the steps taken to get Drupal from its basic form to a school district website with teacher created pages.