Programming blog

I'm going to be working with a partner to create a Drupal site for my school. We have a full month to work on the main details of the site, and will work on improving it over the course of the whole year.

The idea is that we want to build a site which will serve as a marketing front-end for the school, and as an way to distribute information to parents and students from the school, and allow teachers to collaborate with each other and their students.

I know that Drupal can do the job. I plan on using this blog to document my process.

Today we started by setting up 2 domains for us to use, one as a back-up to the other, and installing a mirrored Drupal installation on both of them. Plan is to start with a huge bundle of modules (most of which will never be enabled) to remind ourselves of all of the features available to us through the active community at Drupal.org. We don't want to build anything from scratch that exists already.

The major difficulty with the site will be in the intended upgrades. We want to eventually have parents able to monitor their child's progress through their account on the website. So we have a lot of sensitive information that we need to protect, which means access control is going to have to be carefully checked.

As you know, a colleague and I are working on our new school website. This part of a series of blog posts explaining what we have done.

The very first task we did was to look at the information we were provided on the needs of the school in terms of menu layout and functionality. This was actually fairly easily done since we had spent the previous year working in a committee. From this, we decided on a menu structure and overall plan for our site.

Our idea is to segment the site using Organic Groups, largely because it's easy to create access control (just assign users to the groups they are allowed to view) and easy to maintain relationships between the content of the site and it's location within the site. We are also planning on using the Panels module to provide the display of the group nodes and the front page.

We plan on using the Views module to expose our site information, and using custom content types to make it easier for users to submit information for display within the correct view. We may end up using CCK to add some fields to our nodes, particularly for our Alumni users to submit user profiles and for our school bulletin items.

The site is already starting to come together a bit, which is exciting.

David