Drupal+Thoughts

Blog - date 12-07-07 Welcome to the new website! It’s located at http://goodpasture.org or http://www.goodpasture.org (either will get you there.) You and I are joining a new adventure - as with most journey’s, it’s full of wonder and excitement and trepidation. The main thing to know is where we’re going.

Here’s the exciting part- from this point on, Goodpasture will be a school w/ unprecedented responsiveness on the web. You should have seen Vicki & Rhonda’s face light up after they realized they could easily add a notice to the home page about early school closings!

The wonder part of this journey is part of the new ideas that are our vehicle for the trip. RSS feeds, WYSIWYG editors, blogs, Content Management Systems; if it’s all greek to you, don’t worry- I speak the natives language, and usually have the ability to make you laugh as I translate!

The trepidation- & I have this as much as rest of the bus load of us- that comes not from fear of hardware failure or bad spelling in my 1st blog, but from the potential stress of having all this “out there.” I fear My/Our name on something that doesn’t reflect the awesomeness of this school or the God we serve.

I fear not being able to accurately manage the message of who we are or what we’re up to; and Mom driving to a basketball game in the rain that I said was changed to 4:30 and actually was canceled. It’s just a technology glitch that I wasn’t able to correct in time for her to see, but it still put her out.

I fear not being able to do my job without this web thing causing me to sacrifice being able to do all the other jobs that I do; like be an excellent dad and a great husband.

So that’s why I’m asking you along for the ride- this Goodpasture Team is able to do far more than 1 person at a time could. The new web page is not a finished project but a work in progress. WE will need to do that work, and soon you’ll receive info on how to log into the site and how to add content – for now, I’d love it if you’d explore every nook and cranny and tell me what needs to be fixed. Try to search for stuff, think like a parent of our students, tell me sections that should be added. If you would step up further, start writing that intro to the Bible Department page, the pictures for the Cheerleading page, and all the other things you find important. I’m excited- Let’s see what we can do together!

Blog - date 1- 08 So here we are in day three of having launched the new site; Friday I spent pacing the virtual halls of the site like a 1st time father – once it launched, the developer at our design company emailed me and said “It’s a boy!” As I slowly work to add more content and fix issues that others help point out, I realize more and more what a huge job this could be for one person. So I did a search for Drupal community experience and the first interesting thing I came upon was this bit of wisdom from a contributor named Webchick:

“The cool thing about [Drupal] development (and this is true of open source in general, actually) is that it's not about who's the best coder with the biggest brain who's been doing this since they were in diapers and is more fluent in 1s and 0s than English. It's more about what happens when a bunch of people put their heads together on a problem, each with their own experiences and expertise, and come up with the best solution possible.”

By the way, Drupal is the name for the framework of code that we’re using to create this site. It’s a form of software called Open Source- means it’s not bought or sold, just licensed as an official version while the programmers are able to expand and fix things through peer review. This site is designed to work the same way – we work together to expand and fix as necessary. This will work by each of us adding what we are able, and the only new skill you need to learn is how to most effectively share that work. All faculty and administration members are able to log into the site. Once logged in, you may add or edit the content; we’ll talk about the how in an upcoming training. The coolest thing about all this – this is what the body of Christ is supposed to look like anyway; so we’ve got a leg up already. We don’t have to worry about setting up rules like “don’t mess up another faculty member’s page just because you don’t like how they slighted you two years ago.” We already share a common vision and the means to get there have been added to. I realize that new can be a pain- but again, remember where we’re going, and we’ll serve our students and parents even better than before.

Blog - date 9/20/09 - 2 years later; Still Content Crazy

Having been the site's admin for more than a year and a half, having trained the whole faculty on it's usage, I've reached a point where I need a change on how to get this site to fly by itself. Here's the problem - if everybody has been trained, why are they still calling me to add stories to the site? I was hired to solve the problem of having a bottleneck at the changing of content on the site. I picked Drupal, because it, like all content management systems (CMS) sites, are built to handle tons of content creation. So where's the content?

I'm sure the main culprit to this crime is the old nut of time/demands. So the approach I'm going to use to get some re-prioritization going is two-fold.
 * 1) The first appeal is to my main content controllers - the teachers. They have an interest in getting students to the place where they "Get It." From the chapter questions to the poster projects, there are lots of ways built into their classroom process that are designed to capture those "got it" moments - and the next step involves transfering those moments into the teacher's blog.