Using Drupal for Your Organizational Website (or, how to use Drupal without cursing)

Michelle Murrain Nonprofit Open Source InitiativeMetaCentric Technology Advising

Open Source CMS

Content Management Systems manage website (or intranet) content

Open Source Content Management Systems have become one of the real open source success stories

The three most popular open source CMS in the nonprofit sector are: Joomla Drupal Plone

Drupal Drupal is an open source CMS based on

PHP and MySQL It can be installed and run on any server

with Apache, MySQL and PHP (including Linux/UNIX, Windows and Macintosh)

It also runs on PostgreSQL (another open source Database system)

It has an extremely active developer community, with lots of resources available

It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS for nonprofits

Drupal, cont.

Drupal is more developer friendly than it is user friendly (for site building, primarily)

This makes it extremely flexible and powerful It makes it possible for developers to create

feature rich sites It makes it very difficult for nonprofits to build

websites on Drupal on their own (unless they have staff who know it or can learn it.)

However, organizations can maintain Drupal sites quite well once trained

Brief History of Drupal

It was created originally as a bulletin board system, and open sourced in 2001

It has had broad adoption since version 4 It is now on version 6.6 (point upgrades

happen every few months) Version 5.x is also maintained (now at

5.12) Many sites are still built with Drupal 5

because some modules haven't caught up.

Brief Interlude: Drupal vocabulary

Node: a piece of content stored in the database. Basically a page

Content Type: types of content by how they are displayed and organized

Module: an add-on to provide new functionality Theme: a set of templates and stylesheets that

determine the look and feel of the site Permissions: access to specific Drupal content and

features Roles: sets of user permissions Taxonomy: the way Drupal categorizes content Views: ways to customize presentation of content.

Basic Drupal Features Drupal can be used for all sorts of sites

Standard sites, members only sites, blogs, intranets

Has a strength is in community sites – where people can log in and create content

It has blogs and commenting built in Drupal has a granular permissions system It has a robust and flexible theming

system Drupal is modular, and there are tons of

modules available

Basics of Drupal Implementation

Do it yourself? Get help? Once it is set up, administration of a

Drupal site is a lot easier than it used to be

But setting up a Drupal site requires expertise

Requirements for installation of Drupal

It is a web application, so it requires a server running web server software (like apache). Also requires PHP and MySQL (or PostgreSQL)

Can be installed on most standard web hosts. Some have “one click” install of Drupal

Installation of Drupal

Download from http://drupal.org Expand file to a directory in your

webserver that is accessible Set up a new database Go through the installation procedure

Building and Customizing a Drupal Site

Once installed, the Drupal site is very basic

Additions to your Drupal site will be made using themes and modules

Themes Themes change the

look and feel of your site

If you have someone else do your site, they will likely design a custom theme for you

Lots of themes are available at: http://drupal.org/project/Themes

Drupal Modules to use

There are some great modules included in the basic Drupal install that you should use (depending on site function)

Blogging module Comment module Forum Taxonomies (categorizing content) Profile (user profiles)

Modules to add

Drupal out of the box is very basic. You'll almost definitely want to add modules

WYSIWYG editors Content Construction Kit (CCK)

Allows you to add custom fields to a node in Drupal

Views allows for customized view of content –

like pages with particular kinds of categorized content organized in a particular way

Demos

Drupal Resources

htttp://drupal.org - main Drupal website http://drupal.org/forum - forums http://www.lullabot.com/ - podcast,

instructional video, articles, etc. (geared towards developers)