Week 5: Networking

This week I focused on trying to locate the Drupal community in Iowa, in the hopes of getting people to help us execute the project. I contacted a "virtual" company, Lullabot, that specializes in training people in Drupal; Cliff and I spoke with them and there is a possibility they may do some training for us in November. I also found an Iowa users group on the Drupal groups website and put up a post asking for help. I was invited to their monthly meeting next week in Ames, but am unable to attend. The responses I got did show interest in the project, so I'm hoping I can figure out a way to work with them.

I also contacted an instructor in the Art department about the possibility of arranging for design students to "donate" templates for the interface. I emailed my Electronic Publishing instructor from last spring to ask his advice, and I also found a person in the ITS department who is a Drupal enthusiast and is involved in the developer community on campus. Cliff and I will be meeting with him, hopefully next week (incidentally, this led me to discover that there will be a "Code Camp" in Des Moines in November, which might be a good place to learn about Drupal and meet collaborators). Finally, I emailed Bharani, the new tech support person for the digital fellows, to see if she might also be a resource on the project.

So I basically have a lot of balls up in the air right now, and it will take some time for them to lead to anything concrete, but I feel like I've made progress. The challenge will be to get people who say they're interested in the project, to actually commit to working on it -- especially if it's on a volunteer basis.

Other things on my plate: looking for sample interfaces -- mostly site builders, which is pretty much the functionality we want. I especially like Google Sites and Weebly; they both have clean, uncluttered design and user-friendly interfaces. I'm also working on making a web page for the CIP project on the Widernet website, as an informational tool for people who may be interested in working on it. Also, I'm narrowing down the possible features and functions that we will want to include in each template.

Week 4: Changing Gears

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.

Week 3: Not Quite Sure What I'm Doing Yet...

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!

Week 2: Lots of Time in the Server Room

The week started off with a meeting between myself and Brent to talk more about the project. The need is for one or more templates that can be used by various community groups, e.g. schools, health clinics, etc., to create their own web pages or sites. My job during the first couple of weeks is to research various content management systems and try to determine which one/s would work best, as well as looking at existing websites of this type to see what information is commonly included.

I checked out some elementary school web sites, and found their basic content to be fairly uniform (contact info, academic calendars, faculty lists, and lunch menus are typical). I also looked at an open-source CMS specifically geared toward primary schools, called Site@School. It provides templates for schools to create and maintain their own sites for free. I installed it on the WiderNet server so I can try it out. At first glance, it looks like a good option.

The rest of the week I spent tackling Drupal. After getting it installed on the server (which was a bit tricky, but helped me brush up on my rusty command line and SQL skills), I played around and tried to figure out how it can meet our needs. There are a ton of modules to download, and I added a few that seem useful. I also did more reading and watched some online tutorials. My feeling is that Drupal can be used to do just about anything, but that very fact gives it a steep learning curve. I have a feeling I won't fully understand how it works until I have a concrete draft of the template to plug in. But it will help that WiderNet is going to start using Drupal for its website, and will be bringing in an "expert" this week to teach staff the basics.

In the coming week, I will begin working with Site at School and look around for other CMS's we might be able to use. I also need to get started on another ongoing task, which is to create documentation for the project.