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By jwatt on
Hi all,
A friend of mine that works for a charity dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and abuse has asked for my help in finding a new webmaster to replace their old site and in deciding on the website technology. I have a couple of initial questions regarding Drupal that I was hoping some people here might be able to help me with.
First, I'm wondering how suitable Drupal is for a charity that relies on volunteers, and that does not yet have funding to pay someone to work on their website? After the "baby P incident" in the UK last year a very capable professional designer became a dedicated volunteer, but the technical side of the site is an open question.
My second question, which I guess is quite closely related to the first is, how "easy" is it to find volunteers that are competent at using Drupal, and what is the best way to find such volunteers?
If anyone has any thoughts or input on these questions I'd be very happy to hear them. Thanks in advance to anyone that can help. :-)
Comments
Technically you might break
Technically you might break up the need into three parts
1) Setting up the site
2) Maintaining the site
3) Maintaining the content
If you keep things simple 3 should be where most of the time is spent over the life of the website. With some pre-planning this part can be pretty straightforward and something you can (or should be able to) teach volunteers quickly.
For 1, it would help to have someone who already knows Drupal but is not required. If you keep the sites needs simple you can minimize the effort here. I would say the focus should be making it easy for people to add/edit content and organizing it so visitors can find it.
The effort for 2 can be minimized by again keeping the site simple.
So while Drupal can do many things and one can customize it to ones hearts content keeping you site simple will make it easier for volunteers to maintain.
That's all great advice.
That's all great advice. Thank you nevets.
I could hopefully do the initial setup at least. A couple of months ago I managed to set Drupal up on my own site and got a primitive single user "blog" working. I didn't get much further than that, unfortunately, since my own (unrelated) full time and volunteer work keeps me pretty overloaded. However, I did get the impression that it could be hard and very time consuming to get a site structured, functioning and looking "right" - even for a relatively simple site, if it doesn't conform to the default Drupal structure. (I'd be happy to be wrong about that of course.) The designer is very down to earth and pragmatic, so I'm sure she'd do her best to work with Drupal, rather than against it, but I'm wondering how good a fit the basic Drupal structure is.
Your key phrase
Your key phrase is
While Drupal is flexible, not all that flexibility is readily available without spending some time learning Drupal. For a site run by volunteers with little Drupal experience Drupal will work better for you if you work to Drupal vs trying to bend Drupal to your will.