[Air-L] CMS for cross-dept/university project?

[Alexandra Samuel]

hi Chris,

Jumping into the conversation on the CMS front. I've built about thirty online communities and blogs, some in Drupal and some in Wordpress, and echo what has been said about Wordpress being a bit easier for folks to use (that said, the latest Drupal release is really focused on usability). Much depends on what your campus has the most of; if there's an IT team that has experience with one or the other, I'd make that the decisive factor.

But before you jump into platform choice (a subject I can geek on about for hours) let me suggest a few meta-level steps & considerations:

1. Get really clear on your requirements before you choose a platform. In other words, make a list of the kind of content you need on your site, the functionality you need, and the different kind of users who will use the site (and what they need to have permission to contribute, edit or view). You inspired me to finally (!) post the quick-and-dirty requirements for our website in progress (see http://bit.ly/hZmlqG ); I wrote them in a very Drupally way but you could just make a list of the different content types and functions needed and then get some advice on which platform is best suited.

2. Think not just about what kinds of participation/contribution you'd like, but what you'll realistically achieve. I note that you want "social media tools" but I find a lot of organizations over-invest in social capacity that turns out to be unsustainable at their size (for more on this, and strategies that DO work for smaller organizations, see this post: http://bit.ly/why90101). What I've found sustainable for us is to have a 10-hr/wk student who keeps our Twitter account active, and who can review the blog posts that our various faculty and associates have written on their various blogs & then get them onto our site (initially via cut-and-paste but ultimately via an aggregation that queues those posts for review & approval). Since you're running a writing program you can look at hiring students to do more writing-intensive work (e.g blogging ) but I'd have very low expectations for faculty contribution, unless those faculty members are already writing blogs that you can republish or creating other kinds of content (course assignments, papers, etc) that an enterprising student assistant could round up and post to the blog.General rule of thumb is it takes 2x as much effort to get someone else to contribute as to write something yourself.

3. Collaborating with other universities is totally smart and in a sane universe would make sense; that said over 6 years in building online communities for NGOs we never saw a single aspirational peer-to-peer collaboration actually come to pass. What seems to work better is for one organization (i.e. you) to take the lead, build what you need, and then make it available for others to use. You can do this by downloading your entire site configuration and handing it to  someone else to use as the basis for creating their own site (as a tarball) or conceivably (in the case of Drupal) creating a single multi-site installation that allows all the different organizations to run their site off the same installation (saves on maintenance and development costs but limits your ability to diverge from one another in your site structure, though not in your sites' design.)

The big advantage of Drupal for what you're talking about is its use of taxonomy. If you were building a Drupal site you could set up some overarching categories (which you can use in addition to free tags) and use those to categorize events, speakers, teaching resources and other types of content (e.g. status updates, blog posts). Drupal automatically generates a page for every category or tag on the site, so for example you could end up with a page on "scientific writing" that would include events, speakers, teaching resources, blog posts etc all related to that topic, and automatically have comparable pages for professional writing, online communications, nonprofit communications etc. With a very modest amount of custom theming work (ie. the creation of custom templates) in Views, you could make those tag/category pages divide up those different kinds of content into different sections of the page and it can all look quite nice. 

Wordpress is going to be at least a bit easier for folks to contribute to (esp for bloggers) but a bit less flexible (though it's amazing how much you can do in Wordpress now). It's a bit easier to mess around with and tweak, which can be a pro or a con: if you've got one, semi-geeky person who gets into it, they can continue building out the site by adding widgets, plugins, customizing the theme, etc. All that is possible in Drupal too but a little trickier; it takes a higher level of skill and nerve to hack on a Drupal site. (I say this as a woman who regularly tortures her Wordpress blog but is a lot more cautious when working on my Drupal sites).

BTW note that both Wordpress and Drupal can support aggregation-driven strategies as noted above in #2. In principle we'd be happy to share our Drupal install for simcentre.ca once it's done but I'd need to check with our long-suffering developers to see if that is ok with them.

OK I'll stop now but happy to answer more questions if it's helpful. Best of luck!

Alex

Alexandra Samuel, Ph.D. 
Director, Social + Interactive Media Centre, Emily Carr University
alex at alexandrasamuel.com | Twitter @awsamuel | 604.726.5445