Using Drupal for Your Organizational Website (or, how to use Drupal without cursing) Michelle Murrain Nonprofit Open Source Initiative MetaCentric Technology Advising

Open Source CMS Content Management Systems manage website (or intranet) content Open Source Content Management Systems have become one of the real open source success stories The three most popular open source CMS in the nonprofit sector are:  Joomla  Drupal  Plone

Drupal Drupal is an open source CMS based on PHP and MySQL It can be installed and run on any server with Apache, MySQL and PHP (including Linux/UNIX, Windows and Macintosh) It also runs on PostgreSQL (another open source Database system) It has an extremely active developer community, with lots of resources available It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS for nonprofits

Drupal, cont. Drupal is more developer friendly than it is user friendly (for site building, primarily) This makes it extremely flexible and powerful It makes it possible for developers to create feature rich sites It makes it very difficult for nonprofits to build websites on Drupal on their own (unless they have staff who know it or can learn it.) However, organizations can maintain Drupal sites quite well once trained

Brief History of Drupal It was created originally as a bulletin board system, and open sourced in 2001 It has had broad adoption since version 4 It is now on version 6.6 (point upgrades happen every few months) Version 5.x is also maintained (now at 5.12) Many sites are still built with Drupal 5 because some modules haven't caught up.

Brief Interlude: Drupal vocabulary Node: a piece of content stored in the database. Basically a page Content Type: types of content by how they are displayed and organized Module: an add-on to provide new functionality Theme: a set of templates and stylesheets that determine the look and feel of the site Permissions: access to specific Drupal content and features Roles: sets of user permissions Taxonomy: the way Drupal categorizes content Views: ways to customize presentation of content.

Basic Drupal Features Drupal can be used for all sorts of sites  Standard sites, members only sites, blogs, intranets  Has a strength is in community sites – where people can log in and create content  It has blogs and commenting built in Drupal has a granular permissions system It has a robust and flexible theming system Drupal is modular, and there are tons of modules available

Basics of Drupal Implementation Do it yourself? Get help?  Once it is set up, administration of a Drupal site is a lot easier than it used to be  But setting up a Drupal site requires expertise

Requirements for installation of Drupal It is a web application, so it requires a server running web server software (like apache). Also requires PHP and MySQL (or PostgreSQL) Can be installed on most standard web hosts. Some have “one click” install of Drupal

Installation of Drupal Download from Expand file to a directory in your webserver that is accessible Set up a new database Go through the installation procedure

Building and Customizing a Drupal Site Once installed, the Drupal site is very basic Additions to your Drupal site will be made using themes and modules

Themes Themes change the look and feel of your site If you have someone else do your site, they will likely design a custom theme for you Lots of themes are available at: ect/Themes

Drupal Modules to use There are some great modules included in the basic Drupal install that you should use (depending on site function)  Blogging module  Comment module  Forum  Taxonomies (categorizing content)  Profile (user profiles)

Modules to add Drupal out of the box is very basic. You'll almost definitely want to add modules  WYSIWYG editors  Content Construction Kit (CCK) Allows you to add custom fields to a node in Drupal  Views allows for customized view of content – like pages with particular kinds of categorized content organized in a particular way

Demos

Drupal Resources htttp://drupal.org - main Drupal website - forums podcast, instructional video, articles, etc. (geared towards developers)