Basecamp has been mentioned, and while I love it it's definitely not a CMS; it's a project collaboration tool. Sounds like you are looking for a social community CMS. I would recommend looking at Sakai, Jive SBS, or Drupal. Drupal can be configured to do many things, and there are many University sites run on it. You also might like Sakai, a collaboration and learning tool for educators by educators. http://sakaiproject.org/ I have friends who work for drupal.org and the Sakai Foundation - let me know if you want me to introduce you via email. Regards, Sharon On Mar 11, 2011, at 1:10 PM, Ren Reynolds wrote:
Chris,
If your focus is mainly on collaboration then I would look at one of the many off the shelf tools on the market. Basecamp has been mentioned, I would also suggest Huddle (http://www.huddle.com/) which I've used on a number of projects. Many of these have a free option and / or education and not-for profit licensing.
I don't want to put your developer out of a job but there are so many as-a-service options out there now that I would strongly urge to you go for one of those and not to build or even customise much of anything. What's more the on going support costs of Drupal would tend to be more than WordPress as it is a more complex (though more flexible) product.
ren
On 11 Mar 2011, at 20:48, Chris Werry wrote:
Hi,
Was hoping someone on the list might be able to offer some advice on CMS choice.
We have a common book program on campus. The writing program and some departments teach the same book in order to foster conversation and community. There is interest in expanding this so 4 or 5 other universities/colleges in the area also participate.
Folks on our campus want to set up a CMS to help make this happen. I'm trying to help with some of the planning. They want a CMS that can be used to coordinate events and speakers, upload shared teaching resources, and perhaps leverage some social media tools to build community. But nobody involved has much technical expertise, and...I'm not sure they really know what they want to do with the site.
Early on I showed them some drupal sites, but some of our partners weren't too familiar with this, and at that point we didn't have any tech people to help with drupal. So the conversation turned to Wordpress...I showed them more model sites, including CUNY's Academic Commons, which they really liked. But of course a group of developers put a lot of effort into this. So it would be no simple feat to attempt something similar.
We now have one developer, and as it turns out she's most familiar with drupal - although she can also build Wordpress sites.
So my question is, does anyone have any recommendations? Perhaps some model sites or distributions of drupal? (Has anyone tried openscholar - I suspect it may be too focused on building individual faculty sites). Or a Wordpress site that fits the bill?
One final thought. The folks running this do have some money, so if you've been involved in a customization of drupal or Wordpress which could be reworked and re-themed by our developer, they might be willing to pay for 'consulting' etc.
I'm interested in this main because I'd like to see such platforms created for our writing program, in order to support some of the work we do across departments and with outside groups.
Any advice greatly appreciated.
Chris _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http:// aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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