Gathering info for a poll on school websites

[speckytecky]

I'm thinking of posting a poll to try and gain an idea on what works school website wise.

Something along the lines of

What is your school website based on:

Joomla
Wordpress
Drupral
DotNetNuke

Would this be useful?

If so what others should I include?

[Trapper]

Joomla now. Hoping to move it to Sharepoint, use another site in our farm for it.

[nephilim]

Joomla for one of my lower school feeders, and some custom html stuff that looks like a 10 year old knocked up for my schools. I tried to move them to joomla but they wanted none of it....sad times.

[Arthur]

If so what others should I include?

I'm thinking of using Zotonic or Jekyll for ours.

[TheMan100]

Doesn't Joomla also support LDAP?

[Hokalus]

We use Drupal here

[speckytecky]

Thanks for all the useful replies so far folks.

I have had a quick look at the 2 you mention below Arthur. Zotonic in particular looks good. Out of interest why are you looking at them in pref to the seemingly standard Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal? When I post up the poll I'd like to gather opinion on the strengths and weaknesses of each package 9or has it already been done?).

I'm thinking of using Zotonic or Jekyll for ours.

[nephilim]

@arthur do you have a link to what a Zotonic website looks like?

[Arthur]

Zotonic in particular looks good. Out of interest why are you looking at them in pref to the seemingly standard Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal?

Out of the three you mentioned I do like WordPress the most. However, there are several reasons why I have started looking at alternatives.

1. The large number of security vulnerabilities WP continues to have. We would be hosting the website ourselves, rather than on WordPress.com, so getting hacked is a concern.
2. WP upgrades can easily break plug-ins and vice versa.
3. Plug-ins such as WP Super Cache and WP Minify should be built-in as standard IMO. I know school websites don't tend to get 100s of hits per second, but it would be nice to have the website be as fast as possible out of the box (particularly when using shared webhosts). WordPress SEO would be good as well.
4. The last time I looked at Joomla (around v1.5), it didn't look like there were many options to restrict precisely what users can/cannot do. Not sure if this has changed since?
5. Joomla websites all look the same (especially school ones).

WP hasn't been ruled out completely though. Being one of the most popular blogging/CMS platforms in the world certainly has it's advantages.

do you have a link to what a Zotonic website looks like?

Here are a few. They look quite normal to me.

• newislandfestival.com
• verafin.com
• thomasvording.com
• mediafonds.nl

You may find this interview with one of the Zotonic developers quite interesting too...

http://pokingarounderlang.wordpress....he-erlang-cms/
http://pokingarounderlang.wordpress....ang-cms-pt-ii/

[mthomas08]

We have some one here who uses Word Press but this is not for school sites though, we have frog.

[alunmjones]

I was building my own from scratch, was going quite well, id got ldap to work for logins and was about ready to make the content managment bits when i was told that we would be using the school Moodle site and 2 kids from higher 6 would be looking after the external bits.

well they did for a little while, now they arnt any more and im going to have to go through it and fix it, its not to bad, but it could have been better as a seperate site i think

[webman]

I'm planning to use CMS Made Simple for the new version of our school site due this summer. I've used it on several projects now and it's rather good and does everything I want.