In the process of completing this largish (for me) project at work, I thought it would be good to get down in some logical order, a bit about the project, what we learned, what was hard/easy and what we would change.  It will take more than one post to get it all down, so I appreciate your patience as I get this serial out into the cloud.

Off to a cautious beginning in November 08, culminating in the launch in the last week of May 09, my partner in crime and manager at work – Linda and myself have built our new library website, using Drupal – an open source content management system.

First off, some quick explanations.  Drupal is a content management system (CMS) – a software package that enables the user “to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” (Drupal 2009)  CMS’s can be used to organise many different types of digital content, but ours was to be used for the library website.  Drupal is also open source, which means the software is free and there are many modules which can be used with it, which have been developed by the programming community around the world.

But let’s start back at the beginning.  Our library website was long past due for an overhaul.  It needed a new look and a bit of content reorganisation.  Some of the dross needed to go and we needed a bit more glam.  The website hadn’t had any more than a minor tweak and small additions since 2005 – a long time in web terms.

We had been looking to use a vendor product which would enable us to have a combined OPAC and website, but unfortunately that didn’t work out as hoped and so we had another look at our options.  We narrowed them down to two, either in-house development using a content management system or purchasing an out of the box CMS.  It was agreed that it would be done in-house and Linda and I began looking at our options for open source CMS’s.

There were many options there also, but again we narrowed our choices down to two – Drupal and Joomla.  Both had a lot going for them – including compatibility with Web 2.0 tools, WYSIWYG functionality and much more. We opted to go with Drupal, mainly because it had a large library user base in the US which we could use for inspiration and help and for the access to local support from our ISP. It didn’t hurt that my husband, a computer programmer was also using it to develop a website.

So having made the decision in November 08, it was time to get started.  We developed a timeline of learning about Drupal, developing the new website and moving the content over.  As with many projects, the plan was revised a few times and although the project never worked the way it was planned in terms of what activities happened when, we were pretty much right on the dot for the timing of it all.

Our next step was to work with our ISP – Vicnet, to get Drupal installed and ready for us to start building the new website.  They were incredibly supportive and helpful throughout the whole process and got us out of a couple of interesting situations which could have been very problematic.  Initially, we had at the software installed on our part of one of their webservers, but when we needed a more current version of PHP to make things happen, it moved to one of their development servers.

And we were off and running.  Problem now was – how do we use this thing?  It was installed for us, we had IP access and log-in details, but very little clue about how to work with this software.  The clue that I did have came from working with the blogging software Word Press, on both my blog and Libraries Interact – thank goodness for that experience alone!

So we did what all clever librarians do in these situations, we looked for resources to help us learn about this wonderful new toy we had to play with. This ended up being mostly a decent book with great instructions on how to do various tasks, a great series of online videos and Drupal forum posts.

That’s enough for this post.  Stay tuned for the next enthralling episode, where we really get down to the nitty gritty of building the website.