This week threw me for a loop. During a meeting on Thursday, I found out that I really didn't need to be spending time figuring out how to make things work in Drupal, or any other CMS for that matter. We will hire "rent-a-coders" to customize the CMS once we have decided what features we want. My involvement is to research what those features should be, and to guide the process of making the whole thing happen. My role is purely project management and not really hands-on as far as implementing the site, which I hadn't been entirely clear on before.
It was decided in the meeting that we will be using Drupal for sure. The interface for users to add their own content should be "dirt easy", meaning users shouldn't have to log in or use the CMS back-end at all, which isn't possible with Drupal as it is (at least, not that I can tell). So the coders we hire will be be in charge of making this possible. My job now is to research the Drupal community in Iowa and elsewhere and find people we can approach about doing this for us, and/or coming in and training people in the office on using Drupal. I will find people to design the interface; Cliff mentioned design students at the U of I as a possibility as they have volunteered their services before. I will also be in touch with Widernet contacts in Africa who will help us decide on what features should be included, as well as adding local content to the demo version that will be shown to Intel in December or January.
So far, I've put in an inquiry with a Drupal consulting and development business that has an associate in Ames, to see if they can help us out. With the Intel grant, we can afford to pay outside people, although I need to find out for sure what our budget is for that. I also found a group of Drupal enthusiasts in Iowa, and I plan to post a message to their group site next week. Next week I will work further on getting in contact with other people who we can use on the project.
