Drupal Content Management System

Announcements:

• Tentative agenda for next meeting: IT Classification Study and a presentation on UA Communication's new customized Drupal website.

Drupal Content Management System

* Presenter: Tracey Hummel
Learning Technologies Center
tracey@uainfo.arizona.edu

Website:

* http://drupal.arizona.edu
 

Comments & Questions

• Question about when drupal may be offered on w4 server. Should be upgraded soon to allow drupal installs.
• Send an email if you would be interested in having this as a service.
• Is there a preview mode so that if a user creates content, someone can approve the changes first? Could force a user to preview changes before submitting. Can also restrict publishing rights.
• Is the body content styleable? Yes
• Is it possible to create an interface that allows form based input? Module that will create a survey.
• In terms of content creators -- users must fill out certain information / fields. Create custom content type -- define the types and then you can style how they look and where they go.
• Typ03 had more granular conrol of users and their settings.
• How does this deal with version control? Content -- edit -- publishing opens. check "Create new revision" then go back to log message -- can enter information about what you changed. --> creates a new tab named "Revisions". Another module called "dif"
• Throttle - will automatically disable high cpu usage features if server has a lot of hits.
• All content stored in mysql database?
• What about patching? Do you have to download a whole new release or does it patch itself? Major version changes there are things to go back and fix. Don't touch "core code" of drupal... version 6 is coming out soon
• Modules - are version specific.. double check this!
• How does it work with recording traffic? The URL you provide, is this included in a server log? drupal analytics module - tracks your pages.
• Can it reside only on unix or linux? no -- can do windows too
• How well will it attach to an existing sql?
• Possible to run several different websites out of one drupal install.
• UA styles will be added to the drupal area.
• Is it easy to download a template and make modifications? If good at CSS can do it, not too dificult to build template from raw html file.
• If you have a lot of content editors, can drupal handle lots of users.
• typ03 learning curve is huge compared to drupal
• Easy to restrict user to a certain page that they have access to change? Might be a module out there for that...
• Drupal is LDAP -- so able to do webauth
• Is there an approval process that covers what gets added as a module?
• Difference between authenticated users who are visitors to site and authenticated users that can make changes to the site content... confusion on this
• Please pass on comments about usefullness / non-usefullness of the CMS
• Would LTC charge for service? Maybe. Handholding -- LTC is exploring the possibility of providing a server and has not yet considered how it would be offered.