Greetings! At 10:14 PM +0000 6/5/09, Jane Pease wrote:
Here I come meandering along behind the times as usual, but I have been thinking that it is time to have a costume "presence" on the web, both for the purpose of organizing and storing information and providing information to others. Some of you on this list have the most marvelous sites, and I wondered if you all would mind sharing your thoughts on the best approach. Frex, journal vs. website, vs.
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I would recommend building a web site using the Content Management System (CMS) Drupal (http://Drupal.org/). This can be done without you actually having to know HTML, PHP, or MySQL, but at the same time you get a very powerful tool that uses all those things to create an attractive, essentially infinitely expandable site.
One of the advantages of Drupal is that it is not organized around "pages" so much as organized around content/information. As a result, you can easily place the same content in multiple places --for example, both organized and categorized by topic, and presented in a linear blog-like fashion-- without having to re-enter the content (and with any later edits appearing instantly everywhere the content appears).
Another advantage is you can start very simply, and as you learn more, add more powerful features. Also, the visual design is almost entirely independent from the content, so it is very easy to change the look of a site without touching the content. Apart from installation, site development and adding content is done through a web browser, and you can even have user accounts and let select people contribute content (with what they allowed to do determined by you).
Oh, and Drupal is OpenSource software, and free. You would just need to pay for the hosting, not Drupal software. The main requirements of a hosting package would be that it includes at least one MySQL database, and PHP (preferably PHP 5.x), and some way to extract/uncompress compressed archives on the server (instead of on your desktop and then uploading individual files to the server).
If you'd like to play around with it a little before making decisions about hosting providers, you can use XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/) to set up a local test apache server with PHP & MySQL, and then install Drupal locally on your desktop/laptop computer (Windows or Mac or Linux, etc.).
Sharon -- Sharon L. Krossa, PhD, [email protected] * Drupal Training & Consulting in the Stanford Community * Independent Academic Technology Consultant, http://SharonKrossa.com _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
