Redesigning the Teen Web Site with the Drupal Content Management System
Samantha Thomason -- School Library Journal,10/21/2009
The Central Rappahannock Regional Library (CRRL) in Virginia serves the City of Fredericksburg’s almost 290,000 residents as well as Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Westmoreland counties. Since 1999, we’ve had been using a homegrown content-management system to manage our six Web sites: LibraryPoint.org, AnswerPoint.org, KidsPoint.org, TeensPoint.org, HistoryPoint.org, and ArtsPoint.org. With a small Web staff and no full-time programmer, it’s been increasingly difficult for us to publish timely content and work on new projects. So in 2008, we started looking at content-management systems, particularly open source systems, to help us out.
We selected Drupal’s content-management system and began redesigning our sites. Though we didn’t survey teens about the new design, we consulted with the youth services staff and got their feedback. And on September 1, 2009, we launched Teens.LibraryPoint.org and response from our teens has been quite positive.
Drupal lets us manage our content and customize the look and feel of our sites much more quickly than before. The built-in capability for hosting multiple blogs has also been extremely useful. Our teen Blog is the heart of the teens’ home page, and thanks to Drupal’s system we can easily post timely content, whether it’s a book or a movie trailer, a library program promo, or reader’s advisory. We’re now showing interested library staffers how to blog and how to create their own book lists. We’re also very excited that our staff is now contributing more original content and we expect to attract many new contributors.
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| Submitted by: | Samantha Thomason (sthomason@crrl.org) 10/22/2009 12:10:56 PM PT |
| Location: | Fredericksburg, VA |
| Occupation: | Web Developer |
Hi!
In answer to William & Nikki's questions:
Since Drupal is free, there was no cost for the software, but we did need to invest in training in order to make the move to a
CMS. Before deciding on Drupal, we spent a lot of time looking at Plone (and had hoped that would work for us). We attended
two separate training sessions on Plone, and worked with two consultants (about 60-80 hours).
The cost directly associated with Drupal has been minimal. We've purchased several reference books and 3 of us attended
DrupalCon in DC this past spring, but we have not attended any formal training on Drupal. Beyond staff, domain name fees, and
hardware, software & network fees, there is no annual cost associated with our web sites.
Although we didn't go with Plone (we felt the learning curve was too high for the level of customization we were interested
in), the time & money invested in looking at Plone served us well when we decided to investigate Drupal. We were already
familiar with working with an open source CMS, and were able to began building our site with Drupal quickly. We settled on
Drupal in April 2008, and launched LibraryPoint.org in December 2008. In 2009 we worked on fine-tuning the site, upgraded from
Drupal 5 to 6, and moved our arts, kids, and teen site over to Drupal. Our migration to Drupal will be complete when we move
our history site over in the next few weeks.
We've been very fortunate in that our administration has been extremely supportive and patient through the whole transition
and redesign. We didn't have to struggle with "selling" the concept of a CMS.
We did manage this effort ourselves. With the exception of the time spent with Plone consultants, this has been a completely
in-house effort. We're lucky to have a great group of people dedicated to developing and managing our web site. Our web team
is comprised of:
Adriana Puckett, Senior Web Developer
Samantha Thomason, Web Developer
Virginia Johnson, Web Content Librarian
Merri Glover, Web Programmer
Nancy Buck, Outreach Coordinator
Scott Phillips, Young Adult Technology Coordinator
Chris Glover, Network Services Administrator
Contributing/Advising members of the Web Team are:
Caroline Parr, Youth Services Coordinator
Ann Haley, Adult Services Coordinator
Janice Black, Collection Development Coordinator
We've also found other Drupal users in the library community to be very helpful.
Thank you for your comments & questions!
| Submitted by: | William Solis 10/21/2009 12:32:26 PM PT |
| Location: | Ocean View Junior High School |
| Occupation: | Library |
Wonderful conscious evolution ideas and sharing! How much did it cost, initial and annually? How much time and effort? How did you accomplish stakeholder and management buy in? Is there funding for ongoing annual licensing?
| Submitted by: | Nikki Navta 10/21/2009 12:01:42 PM PT |
| Location: | Pittsburgh, PA |
| Occupation: | Education |
Did you hire someone to manage this effort, or did your staff implement the change to Drupal? My company is considering building an e-learning system on Drupal, and I'd really appreciate more information on how your experience was.
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