School Website

Thanks. It's my first project this big and ambitious so I really wanted to do it properly. I'd like to hear suggestions to make it better though if there is anyway to do so. I am also planning of adding some sort of personal portal per role. An example would be for parents; when they log in they will be redirected to a page that has a block for subscribing to the school newsletter and a block presenting recent posts for the grade classes they are subscribed to.

Hello
the link which u provided is not working
Regds,
nm

Hi Tim,
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the pages seem plain I'll take that up ASAP and the login block is a great idea.

Well, as per the Principal the site isn't for students, yet, and made for parents. With the amount of parents anticipated and scheduling conflicts between meeting the parents and giving them their accounts personally I guess she thought it best that interested parents are given a choice whether they would like to be involved through the site or not. The Principal's vision for the site was to give immediate and relevent information that parents and tentative parents to use.

Michael

I couldn't get the search box in the header to work. From the search page it worked nicely.
Yeah, that's one of the things I'm working on. I'm torn between using the faceted search and using the core search but since content isn't as abundant yet I have this part of the project at the backburner.

Why did you decide not to use a book for the Student Handbook? I happened to click through the About the School links first, so it surprised me a little to see book on one and paging on the other.
I have thought about this one but haven't gotten around to doing it and yes you are right that it will make much more sense to do so. I do plan to compile some of the resource links into a book which will include the Student Handbook.

Why do you use two different views of classes (in the footer and the right menu)?
Well, my thoughts was to give a more formal look (like a phone directory) at the bottom and have the "Class List" as a wider view which included a better description.

Do you plan to have a way for parents to contact individual teachers?
One of the concerns that the principal had is to give parents way too much control. One of them is bombarding the teachers with useless concerns so to circumvent that problem is give them a site-wide contact form with specific categories (subjects) to include in their messages.

Why do you require login for calendar items, but not news/announcements?
Another concerns that the principal had was public content versus private content. Although the site has public registrations it makes handling intruders easily and content such as the calendar and the gallery is too closely related to the students. The parents, before the site went up, expressed their concerns that content such as these may be used unlawfully by public-anonymous users.

On the class pages, I didn't like the scrolling fields, but (a) it's just a personal preference and (b) I don't know what else you have in mind for those pages, so maybe it makes a lot of sense.
I do plan redo the "mission statement" presentation to using an ajax type box where you click a read more link and open up the box even more but I haven't gotten around to doing that.

I'm not familiar with your area, so maybe it's not important, but I think the map looked more useful backed out two "levels" and displayed in hybrid mode. You might also consider a picture of the front of the building.
Great suggestion! Will do.

Your URL aliases are well thought out.
Thank you! It took me long nights just to figure out the path for each content-type

The logout tab seemed a little lonely up there. Would it work on the red menu bar?
Well, I have this plan to give each role it's own portal page that includes a latest block for the classes they are in and the links for these portals will be included next to the logout tab. Besides, the principal seems to like it up there. Hehe

What are your plans for the OG module? You're the second school site in a week that I've seen list it. I had not considered it for a school site before, and wonder what I'm missing.
What I like about the OG module is that it gives the classes sort of a mini-homepage. What I did is to make each class private so that the other classes don't "look" in on their posts and parents to get flooded with posts totally unrelated to the classes they are in. I then change the views settings for the class list and class directory to list the classes even if they have privacy on; OG views defaults to hiding groups with the privacy setting on. I do plan to give the class pages ways to upload their own files, a gradebook, per-class categories and gallery. All of those have modules available for them but some are not compatible to the latest OG Module. This is the school's first site and I am not sure how much the teachers are capable in using the site so I decided to just give them an option to create their posts and when the time is right expand the features.

Thanks, Isommer, for the great feedback I really appreciate it. Your feedback helped me alot.

Your site's really good. It does need some work but I think it's laid out pretty well when I saw it but it seems that the site is currently down. Hopefully it goes up soon I think it has great potentiall.

but today, i got this fatal error

Fatal error: Nesting level too deep - recursive dependency? in /home/saintalo/public_html/sites/all/modules/drupalforfirebug/drupalforfirebug.module on line 288

i wish i could build like that
sigh :(

Sorry if I didn't get to answer for awhile been very busy. Well, I used garland as a base theme and reworked the site to how it is now. I am actually in a process of reworking the site to be much more usable. There is an underlying problem of being "too techy" so I am redoing alot of the layouts. In response to the front page question; it was all a mater of block theming and visibility.