List of major sites using Drupal
I'm in a strange situation. I just spent forever (lol) converting my mockup for my school's website into a cool drupal theme but now I'm worried if the district will allow us to use drupal.
Here's the background. They think IIS and Frontpage are the best thing since sliced bread and are what are used in the professional world. They fear inferior (or at least what they think is) technology, and to give an example of the staff employed is: they can't install PHP and we asked them like 2-3 weeks ago.
So, my question is, how do I rationalize using Drupal to them. As of right now, our site looks like a bunch of kids put it together, and of course thats because they did. We need a more professional look and a better way of managing the content rather than the randomly strewn files on the server (I searched it yesterday and we literally have 4000 copies of our logo that people have downloaded and reuploaded in their own folders. I figured out how to set up the permissions the way we need it, got the search running which is the number 1 request of our website and most importantly I got a good looking theme built.
Any ideas on how to convince 'em? thanks for any and all help.
ps: at this point I think I'm going to throw together a PowerPoint about the Pro's of Drupal and the theme and why Frontpage isn't best (aka, its being discontinued...)
Thanks!
Oh and by the way, the old
Oh and by the way,
the old site: http://www.snh450.k12.ks.us
my design w/ drupal: http://snh450.mickens.us
Though front page is being
Though front page is being sunset, SharePoint Designer 2007 takes its place.
I've found it difficult to change the mentality of certain organizations who have come to rely soley on Microsoft Products. Some organizations just want nothing to do with PHP and PHP based applications.
Microsofts new office suite may make this change even harder, considering the way they are marketing the new software.
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http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
The Drupal wikipedia entry
The Drupal wikipedia entry is another good one.
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Check out this for some possible approaches
http://www.ericwoodford.com/site_specification_project
Also, talk to these guys for more ideas
http://groups.drupal.org/drupaled-distro
Do not confine your search for ideas to just education field. You can broaden by looking at reasons why people use Open Source instead of close sourced proprietary projects instead. You should not say things like 'this looks better' that looks like 4 year olds. People are proud of their accomplishments even if they are not the slickest. There are several universities that have used Drupal. (http://drupal.org/node/110996 on front page now) and you can find those mentioned in the forums for additional justifications in the forums. (University of Berekely, etc... uses Drupal for time and cost savings :)
If I recall, bryght.com also has some blog posts on why using Open Source software makes sense.
A bunch of kids can put together a nice site. Another thought, use an introduction to designing a site using a CMS as another possible leverage point for your reasons. Lots of approaches but it all comes down to what your boss will buy into.
As for a list of sites... http://drupalsites.net/ has a nice list and seems to have a bunch of education related sites http://drupalsites.net/categories/education.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
Drupal for school sites
Frontpage, sorry to hear that.. Maybe they need to see sites like MTV's UK site and the TWIT TV site which are both running Drupal (in a customized theme have you).
sepeck pointed to my site spec project, which was a write-up of the design process of my wife's teacher site. Here school district recently went to TeacherWeb for all the staff. We didn't care for the options, plus all her content is already added to Drupal.
Her teacher site
Go Drupal!
United Nations using
United Nations using Drupal
Warner Bros using Drupal
Discovery Channel using Drupal
AOL using Drupal
Sony using Drupal
NATO using Drupal
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ALL using Drupal
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And only Microsoft not using Drupal :)))
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Mahjong Online Games
High Profile Sites that run on Drupal
A quick list of high profile sites that run Drupal:
www.avenuewebmedia.com/high-profile-sites-run-drupal
President & C.E.O of Avenue Web Media, a Chicago company that specializes in web development, online marketing, and professional custom Drupal themes.
That's a shame... from a
That's a shame... from a quick look at the sites linked above it seems the original poster lost that battle. =/
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