Recommendations for a school web site system?

[OverWorked]

Hello,

 

Our school needs a web site - I'd like to know what eveyone else does.

 

We something that can be added to easily by staff and students, with areas that can be locked down so only certain people have access to them.

 

It must be easy to use so the staff can edit their areas without coming to me every five minutes.

 

I suppose I'm thinking of some sort of CMS. We're already starting out with Moodle as a seperate project, but I don't think that's suitable for a front-end public-facing site.

 

We won't be hosting it ourselves, so a good host is needed too.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks.

[Geoff]

Joomla is well used round these parts.

 

http://www.joomla.org/

 

We something that can be added to easily by staff and students, with areas that can be locked down so only certain people have access to them.

 

It must be easy to use so the staff can edit their areas without coming to me every five minutes.

 

No, that's the wrong way to go about it and it will only end in tears. You need to appoint someone (preferably with a decent amount of technical knowledge) as the 'webmaster'. Staff/Students then send things they want on the website to this person.

[webman]

Joomla or Website Baker.

 

You can evaluate a range of CMSs at http://www.opensourcecms.com

[beeswax]

I'm currently using this CMS for the school website. I'm in the process of moving the unfinished site from the hosting company I use to a school based machine. The cms itself is quite easy to use, but there are gaps in the help files which can lead to loss of hair. Get in touch if you decide to go down this route. You can create user accounts that only have the access to add, remove or update content without damaging the layout.

PurpleCloud moved to a new server recently and they've been having intermittent problems which are hopefully sorted out now.

[Guest]

Yep Joomla is the way to go. The problem with joomla is the lack of user config. You can limit access to registered and non-registered users, but no support for groups etc.

 

You'll need an addon like Community Builder i think http://www.joomlapolis.com/

 

Never used this so can't comment.

 

Aggree with Geoff that you to have a webmaster that can have content email to them so that they can vet / check the content.

[edie209]

I really like E107 http://www.e107.org I have a couple of personal sites running with it and I'm just in the process (amonst other things) of converting the school website. A really good feature is that it will intergrate with active directory using one of the available plugins. I have tried others like Joomla but found them to be not as user friendly (my personal opinion). Anyway good luck I'm sure you will get many choices here, we all have our favorites.

[OverWorked]

Thanks for the quick response, everyone.

 

Will Joomla / CMSMS run on IIS? I'd like to set up a test site for them first. I don't want the learning curve of LAMP.

[webman]

Yes, if you install PHP for Window/IIS they will run. Just rembmer that performance of PHP scripts on Windows (especially IIS) will be poor in comparison to a LAMP setup.

 

If you must do it on Windows, I recommend using a package like XAMPP or WAMP to get Apache/MySQL/PHP installed in one go.

 

Incidentally, the new version of Ubuntu (Dapper, 6.06) will give you LAMP "out-of-the-box" with minimal effort.

[edie209]

If you want to test any of these system in house before you go live why not try using Clarkconnect http://www.clarkconnect.org. The latest version comes with all you need to setup your website and it installs very easily onto an old pc. Once you have it installed you can administer it through a web interface.

 

Here this is a machine at my home running it http://www.saltash.pointclark.net its a bit slow because its on my slow broadband connection, but it should give you an idea of what is possible for testing purposes

[Guest]

or take alook at http://jsas.joomlasolutions.com for a standalone Joomla server for testing.

[OverWorked]

Thanks. I'll look into JSAS, or JOOMLA or e107 with Ubuntu.