This week saw less progress than usual due to an illness, which left me missing two days of work. I also had three meetings over the course of the week, so I wasn't left with a lot of time to do project work. I basically continued with what I had been working on last week - experimenting with Drupal and Site@School. On Friday we had Drupal "expert" Matt Arant come in and walk the whole staff through the basics of Drupal, since the Widernet website is being migrated. Matt and I are going to meet next week so he can talk with me about how Drupal can be used to create a user-customized template.
I have a general idea of how this can be done, but the specifics are still sort of eluding me. For example, will each user of the eGranary have to create an account in the CMS in order to change the template, or just use the administrator account? How might the fact that it will be housed on a local server make using it different? I also added the Drupal module that let's the administrator create customized fields for users to populate, but it seems pretty complicated and I'm not having a lot of success figuring it out on my own. I'm hoping Matt can show me how to do it.
I also spent some time investigating other CMS's that we could use. One possibility I found was called EZPublish, which has a very intuitive-looking user interface. I don't have it installed yet but will probably give it a test run next week. Since I'm also familiar with Joomla (I used it for a group project in Electronic Publishing last spring), I'm thinking I should see how it would compare to Drupal as far as meeting the needs of the project.
Next week I'll work on these things and hopefully get more done!
