[clue-admin] Drupal meeting

[Crawford Rainwater]

Comments below.  Good start though indeed.

----- Dennis J Perkins <dennisjperkins at comcast.net> wrote: -----
> 
> 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.
>

Drupal with PHP5 + web server (Apache or nginx are the two Linux ETC has used) + DB (PostgreSQL or MySQL) can work without a distribution specific package for reference.  One just needs to have things in the proper directories in the end and know where the DB is and what the DB user password is to port to another distribution.
 
> 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.
> 

Nice start indeed.  Perhaps some testing and demo for everyone to get a look and feel could be arranged in time?

You can add in "Polls" as another feature perhaps (such as what one sees on Slashdot for example) which might make things easier in reaching out to "all".  RSS feeds are built in as well by default which is another nice feature as well.

> 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.
> 

Add Captcha...period!  That would help moderate the lists and spam some indeed.

> 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.
> 

My personal preference is PostgreSQL, but open minded.

> 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.
> 

One would need to check the Revision box when doing such though in order for this to be active.  Otherwise, there could be issues if a roll back is needed and no revisions noted of course.

> 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.

It does take some PHP tags I believe as well which may or may not be of interest.

--- Crawford

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