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.
Is Drupal a good solution given this set of requirements and goals? If not does anybody have any other good suggestions?
There is some funding available to provide additional development for whatever solution we finally settle on.
Many thanks for any input that experienced Drupal users can provide...
Comments
You've found your system
This is exactly what Drupal does.
go to this post also.
looks like a good match
I think Drupal can handle your needs easily. A bit of custom development will be needed to support your ranking requirement. See the Services page for available hosting and consulting/development resources.
Eureka!
You've found it. I too had a similar question when I was looking at Drupal for my school district's Intranet. It will do just about anything you want it to do and more. You can take a look at some of the comments I got from my question at http://drupal.org/node/view/1197.
You found it
Drupal is the system for you. Check out At Home In America we just re-deployed it on top of Drupal.
POSTNUKE
HOWEVER, PostNuke might be a much better supported application for your needs.
That is more of a personal opinion
I have used phpnuke, postnuke and drupal to run various projects of mine, even at one point making my salary from postnuke consulting/customization ..
And in my opinion drupal is definately the more featured system. But drupal's main strong point is it's clean and concise design , which basically guarantees that if something can't be done at the moment, with a little bit of brain power, it will be added to the features or modules soon enough.
But that's just my 2c