Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Calendar Software

[Moz (list]

Tracey
> I'm always amazed at how really awesome Drupal is.
> If anyone is interested in creating a Drupal website for their community,
> I'd be happy to give them some support in setting it up.

I've been exposed to both Drupal and OpenAtrium (a derived project) and
I've been pleased with how easy it is to set them up and how configurable
they are. But dismayed at how that quickly turns into "only one person
knows how to modify it" and how often it needs to be modified. And the
little limits that crop up - it took six months to get the current polls
onto the front page of our open-atrium site, and only one person could do
the couple of hours work that was required. It's definitely a skilled job
as far as I can tell.

I doubt that has made your decision easier, but I do think it's important
to know the downside of the "one program to do everything" approach. I
think it depends strongly on how simple your "everything" is - if you just
want one thing, Drupal does that (whatever it is). But when you want a
blog, webmail, forum, announcement system, document archive, photo
gallery, and online polling it starts to get a bit tricky to do all that
in one system. It can be done, it just takes time and effort to set up,
then more to maintain it. And help can be hard to find when you're looking
at interactions between optional components.

We have moved to a split system with some glue code to get single sign-on.
Our web host has a GUI tool to install different things like blogs, photo
galleries etc. So we have a forum, a blog, a calendar etc, but they are
all separate setups, separately configured and everything is the way it
came out of the box just with our graphics on the front. It means we can
add new features, change things round, move it, back it up and so on very
easily, and anyone who has a little knowledge of how to set up web hosting
can play with it (it's not much harder than just playing with HTML+CSS). I
expect the next thing with be a Gallery install so we can manage images
more easily. If my glue script fails that just means logging into each
system separately until I fix it, and likewise if one system fails it's
only that that is unavailable.

Moz