drupal testbed | Research with COPs
Developing understanding and methods for drupal community spaces
I suppose my format for this would start with
Book 1Â – a how to book about the method I’m promoting. All my training session notes
Book 2- made up of stories (pages), notes about each of the children’s books I’ve used.Initially done by me but other people could add theirs too.
Forum
People could start threads to ask for advice about working with children and real books and really anything to do with reading.
I am a member of a now defunct Drupal community at Edublogs Community. It was set up so we could only create blog posts or pages. For a long time I didn’t realise it was Drupal and it was only when I recognised one of the themes that it became clear to me. The community was meant to act as a meeting point for people with blogs hosted by James Falmer’s Edublogs but it never really took off. Most posts were asking for technical advice, hoping for a response from James himself. All the blog posts went on to the front page so I decided to use it to advertise my blog and later the degree exhibition. This did actually work people followed the link to the Classroom Displays blog in my sig and some people did come to the exhibition from there too.
There’s a topic in the questions and answers forum about “blogs or forums” and we are wondering about personalisation in the setup and if maybe new blog posts don’t necessarily get published to the front page.Â
John Smith gave me an opportunity to try out fantastico, and I had a quick experiment. By using fantastico, you can skip over the need to follow the intallation intructions which come with the drupal download. File transfer, making the directory, creating the database, running the script to make the tables, and setting up the first user (admin) are all done for you.
But you will still need to be able to ftp and grant directory permissions in order install additional modules, themes, and allow file uploads.
So a basic install up and running in seconds, and there’s no reason why starting out this way should inhibit further progress so long as the ISP also allows FTP access as well as via control panel, which they almost certainly will unless it’s an educational institution or something like that rather than a commercial ISP, and even then it’s probably just a question of asking for the ftp account details for your domain.
I feel like this should be some momentous piece of writing … instead I shall just say Hi!
folksonomytagtagging
A new vocabulary has been created called ‘folksonomy’ which should enable free tagging on all kinds of content.
It was in the theme configuration: user images in posts, user images in comments
The wysiwyg editor works fine in Camino on my iBook 🙂
Suddenly I have a whole range of goodies at my command like
- being able to see my edit box in full screen mode,
- insert buttons
- justify text
- change my text colour for no very good reason
- emoticons at will.
and, perhaps just as important, I can get rid of the whole lot by disabling rich text.
Good going so far Andy.
I recommend changing what buttons are shown in TinyMCE, add the unlink button (link button not working), remove all the table buttons, add format pulldown, and clear styling button. Also you don’t really need the output Path to be displayed. It’s best to simplify the controls as much as possible. Remember that you can have a different set up for the admin role (create an admin role in admin->access).
These podcasts from Lullabot are also very useful:
http://www.lullabot.com/podcast
By the way, IBM just picked Drupal as the best open source CMS:
http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/ibm_and_drupal
Looks like they’ve adopted it for internal use as well.
Also Forrester Research has published two reports on Drupal:
http://buytaert.net/forrester-reports-on-drupal
Exciting times in the world of Drupal!
