May
17
(2006)
Drupal demo @ UCalgary
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: cms, demo, drupal, ucalgary.
I just gave a demo of Drupal to the UCalgary “web content management system” workgroup - they’re trying to figure out which is The One True CMS that will be supported by IT for use on campus by faculties and departments to easily manage their websites.
Previous sessions were given by advocates of RedDot, ADX Studio, Joomla, Ironpoint, and OmniUpdate. That’s a pretty wide range of proposed solutions, from the high-end, high-cost “enterprise” options, all the way to free/open source options.
Ricardo gave his Joomla session on Monday, and got to champion open source as an important part of the selection process. I got to give a hearty “yeah, me too” and then spent most of the session demoing Drupal, creating content, administering a site, showing several sample sites, and answering questions. I was initially thinking I’d only use about 30 minutes of my 2-hour block, but wound up spending an hour and a half working through solutions and discussing stuff with the group.
Some of the questions were about some really intricate and subtle concepts within Drupal, so people had either done their homework, or they paid attention, or both. We talked quite a bit about the extensible security model in Drupal, about scalability, extensible content types, taxonomies, users and roles, modules and themes, and a bunch of other stuff.
I spent much of the session showing custom content types via the Content Creation Kit, evangelizing RSS as a way to pipe content between sites and systems, and showing various parts of the user- and admin experience.
I’m curious to see which CMS they select at the end of this process. I think they were quite receptive to Drupal, but it’s hard to tell which agenda(s) are most important.
By “websites,” do you mean everything from academic workspaces to official UCalgary public communications? For our “branded/official” UMW webpages, we use Contribute. So far we’ve outsourced everything innovative in the academic space to a webhosting service that supports several CMSs, so we don’t have the “one true CMS” problem. We have lots of other problems with scalability and sustainability, etc. etc., and I know I should be more interested in those problems, but the truth is that right now I think the search for the One True Anything in IT simply plays into vendors’ hands and ties the University’s hands as we try not to fall too far behind innovation on the Web generally.
They’re meaning it to manage faculty/department websites, as well as external relations, the “main” website, etc…
I agree that it’s distracting to search for the “One True Anything” - but IT doesn’t want to get into the application support business (huh?) so they want just one app selected.
I was initially advocating for a more generalized approach - select one of these solutions (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, MovableType, others…), and we’ll support you.
But, they aren’t forcing departments to use The One True CMS - just offering it as a solution for those that want to swing that way.