[clue-admin] Drupal meeting

[Dennis J Perkins]

I'm back from North Dakota and ready to proceed with Drupal.  I hope
everyone had a good Christmas.

Since there is obviously more interest in the website and Drupal, I want
to hold a meeting limited to Drupal.  


I've been looking at CMS to find something that would be flexible and
easy to manage, as well as making it possible for members to participate
in the website.  I like wikis, but others prefer blogs.  Neither
provides everything we want.  Content management systems like Joomla and
Drupal both provide the flexibility I was looking for.  Why did I choose
Drupal over Joomla?  There was nothing outstanding to differentiate
either one and my decision was more practical.  Arch Linux happens to
have a Drupal package but it doesn't have Joomla.  


First, Drupal can provide us with things we currently lack:

1. Forums        In my opinion, this is where some of our mailing lists
should go.  New forums can also be created without requiring users to
subscribe.  
                        Searching is easier too.
2. Blogs            A few years Jeff Cann asked the group if anyone was
interested in CLUE providing blogging.  Nothing came of it, possibly due
to a lack of
                        interest, or due to the work required at that
time to set them up.  Blogs are a core module and very easy to
configure.  I don't know if we 
                        want to open up blogging to everyone or to just
a few members in the group.
3. Wiki              Oreilly's Drupal book details how to set up a wiki.

I've set up up a Drupal site on my laptop to play with Drupal and I have
set up all of the above.

The jobs email list needs to be handled in some way, possibly via a
forum or by creating a jobs form.  Captchas might be something to
consider too because I am starting to see spam hitting the jobs list.

Drupal's modular nature lets us add other features as we need them.  For
example, calendaring is currently something that interests some members.

Drupal is written in PHP, so Apache needs a PHP module.  It also needs a
database program and can use either MySQL or Postgresql.  

Drupal uses the database to do version control, so we can easily roll
back to a previous version of any web page.  There is no need for
external version control of web pages.  Backup involves backing up the
database and the directories holding packages and themes.

Drupal's default editor requires manual editing of HTML tags, but there
are simple WYSIWIG editors too.  Wikis tend to use a wiki markup
language instead and that is available too.
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