08.25.07
Picking a personal CMS
Been doing a lot of research for a new CMS for school and home. It must be opensource, fairly robust and user friendly.
Settled on Joomla
Trying this e-book to learn more.
Wondering what your choice might be – outside of blogging and wikis.
November 2, 2007 at 5:44 am
Sharon, I saw through a comment you left on Jeff Utecht’s site that you had just done some Joomla work for your school. I am rolling out a small Joomla portal for our Career and Tech center. I saw it as an easily scalable solution for the school. I would love to hear more about your decision, deployment, etc..
November 2, 2007 at 6:29 am
Hi Rick,
I am working with a local group to design two templates – one for the district and the other for each of the 6 schools. My main goal is to spread the ability to post information around to the people responsible. I hope to eventually expand the modules to include some other functionality – like document management.
We use Moodle for CMS; Wikispaces for wikis; and I am experimenting with Ning as a social / blogging vehicle. Our teachers do their webpages in another software also which is related to their Groupware (FirstClass).
How are you using it?
November 5, 2007 at 10:00 pm
That sounds great. It seems that you are just taking care of the capstone school portals. Afterall, you have many other pieces in place with the teachers already.
I modified an existing template to fit the needs of the local career and technical center. Like your project we wanted to spread the content publishing to the source. This is a major move forward for the building. The initial desires were around developing an attractive brochure site. That alone would have been an improvement, but only in image. Other than a couple of teachers still working in FrontPage or Dreamweaver and one on edublogs, teachers are not using websites so this is new.
Personally I think a good goal is for the building to begin to visualize possibilities for technology. I think this installation may help facilitate that. I have also allowed for student content to be published with teacher approval. This will give students responsibility for a portion of the site. In the end though, the software really doesn’t matter, as long as it is user friendly, it will come down to sustained pd.
As far as modules go I use some standard modules for content display and have loaded in a calendar component.
November 5, 2007 at 10:10 pm
I would enjoy seeing your site – would you mind posting the URL?
November 7, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Drop me an email and I will send you the link. We are in development still and on one of my development accounts so I can’t really post the link, but I am happy to have you look at it.