Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Calendar Software

[Hummel, Tracey S - (thummel) (thummel]

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.


It is far better than a hand-coded website where truly "only one person knows 
how to modify it".  There are so many tutorials, help videos, documentation and 
other resources out there on Drupal, that I feel anyone with an interest could 
join in the development process. 

I one point, I built a Drupal site with all the functionally that would be 
common for an intentional community but no content added.  I have a simple 
method for making 'clones' of Drupal sites with all functionally ready to go 
within about 15-20 minutes. Even though it is a clone, it is still highly 
modifiable to suit an individual communities needs. It would be a really quick 
jump start.... tons of functionally built in from the very beginning.  If 
someone is interested in working with me on this, I could pick it up again. 

Tracey





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

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