A wiki page on Drupal Groups has a growing list of educational institutions running Drupal.  I bet you could cross-check this list against similar listings for WordPress usage and find many of the same names.  Using one doesn’t presuppose using the other.  In fact both can be valuable pieces of the institutional web tool belt, serving a wide range of uses and users.  The important thing to remember is we technology people care about these ‘plumbing’ issues.  Normal people just want their web sites/applications to work.

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The deeper I dig into Drupal as a content management system the more impressed I am.  Especially for creating community sites it has powerful core-based features for things like relationship behaviors, forums, and individual user blogs.  The coming release of Drupal 7 promises a much improved user interface, addressing the many legitimate user complaints.  If you have been disappointed by Drupal in the past I encourage you to take another look.

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When learning and developing web sites with a content management system like Drupal or WordPress it is generally recommended that you install a test version on your personal computer.  This releases you from the complexities of connecting to a remote web server and allows you to focus on learning and/or developing.  The only trick is the process generally requires finding, installing and configuring the web server, using My SQL to set up a database and a database user, download the CMS software, then install and configure it — with plenty of opportunities to go wrong.   Now the stack installer from Acquia gives you basically a quick, scripted install to get you up and running quickly with Drupal.

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For a good introduction to the community-building power of Drupal this book from Packt Publishing is terrific.

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Jon Mott and David Wiley have posted their paper on Open learning.  Well done, nicely argued, with good supporting references.  Bravo!  Their basic point is traditional Content Management Systems — i.e. Sakai, Blackboard — reinforce the the management side of teaching to the detriment to the innovative, student-centered, learning side of the equation.  And while I agree with much of their argument, I’ve come to realize that this approach also misses some important  points: Read the rest of this entry »

Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!”  The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs.  We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post.  And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:

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