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I'm back from North Dakota and ready to proceed with Drupal. I hope everyone had a good Christmas.<BR>
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Since there is obviously more interest in the website and Drupal, I want to hold a meeting limited to Drupal. <BR>
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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. <BR>
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First, Drupal can provide us with things we currently lack:<BR>
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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. <BR>
Searching is easier too.<BR>
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<BR>
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 <BR>
want to open up blogging to everyone or to just a few members in the group.<BR>
3. Wiki Oreilly's Drupal book details how to set up a wiki.<BR>
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I've set up up a Drupal site on my laptop to play with Drupal and I have set up all of the above.<BR>
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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.<BR>
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Drupal's modular nature lets us add other features as we need them. For example, calendaring is currently something that interests some members.<BR>
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Drupal is written in PHP, so Apache needs a PHP module. It also needs a database program and can use either MySQL or Postgresql. <BR>
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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.<BR>
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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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