Drupal News

I am currently evaluating software for use as a part of website for parents and children engaged in home-schooling via a charter school. Right now I'm a "Drupal outsider" so I have a few questions about whether Drupal is appropriate to the task at hand.

Here's a list of features I'm looking for in a CMS to drive the site:

1 - News posting and commenting facility
2 - Discussion forums
3 - UI flexibility
4 - Active developer and user communities
5 - Flexible authentication (probably will need LDAP support)
6 - Resource ranking system
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The last item bears a bit of explanation. One of the primary functions of the website is to give parents and students the ability to post, review, rank and search for curriculum resources online. These resources will need to be categorized by both general type (college course, textbook, parent-led group, etc.) and by age appropriateness.

The goals of the site are as follows:

1 - Allow members to post, review, rank and search for curriculum resources

2 - Provide a forum where parents and students can share news, ideas and experiences

3 - Provide mostly static content about the charter school

The site is NOT intended to facilitate any web-based course delivery like Blackboard or WebCT or any other equivalent product.

Hugo Espuny has been working hard to prepare the Drupal 4.1.0 Debian package which is now part of Debian's unstable distribution (sid) from where, hopefully, it will bubble up to the stable distribution (woody). Note that the old Drupal 4.0.0 can be found in Debian's testing distribution (sarge).

Drupal developers will also be interested in keeping an eye on the the bug reports reported through the official Debian channels.

I'm wondering about the practical outer limits of what drupal can handle. I have a client who currently has a site with about 40k regular users, and wants to blog-enable them. I'm reasonably confident that I can handle the user detail sync stuff, and have a few ideas about mysql changes that might be needed, but I'm wondering what I've not thought about.

Is anyone out there running a site of that sort of scale with drupal? If so, got any words of wisdom to share?

We put a task list in place. So if you want to help out but don't know where to start, take a look at the task list. There are tasks for non-programmers as well so even if you have never written a line of code in your life, you can help out and become a Drupal contributor. Of course, you can also check the bugs reports, find a bug, fix it, and send a patch to the mailing list. Any help is most welcome. If, after checking the tasks and bug reports, you still want to help but don't know how or where to start, just post a comment below.

It seems that the very promising Google module's development is dead. The module was build directly after Google API's were opened and was - at that time - state of the art.

However, we only scratched the possibilities of Google's potential. I can think of a dozen ways how we could (re)use the API within drupal. Is anyone able and willing to take this project again?

BTW: The module was never released within the drupal site but is still available at: natrak

In busy forums, moderation can be a useful tool for gently enforcing good behavior. Drupal is pretty flexible in its support for moderation, but it could go farther to make moderation more effective.

Plastic.com, to take one example, uses moderation in ways that are different from Drupal's in some major and minor ways. The two most important differences are: 1. Limited pool of mod points, and 2. Karma points accumulate.