Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Judy Hallman <hallman AT email.unc.edu>]

I've become a Drupal fan. Drupal offers a lot of options for community 
participation. You can also run CiviCRM under Drupal (CiviCRM also runs 
under Joomla, but it is better integrated into Drupal).

CiviCRM provides basic constitutent relationship management 
functionality, donor management, membership management, and events 
management. 
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/What+Is+CiviCRM gives 
a pretty good overview of CiviCRM.

I set up the Drupal site http://www.ibiblio.org/comphist/ for gathering 
information and memories that record the history of computing on the 
UNC-Chapel Hill campus. After we get more content in it, we'll ask 
people (like alumni) to register and contribute their memories. Some 
people are already contributing content.

I haven't really used CiviCRM for an organization yet, but I follow the 
developers list and forums and have learned a lot from them. I've also 
helped some with their documentation. The developers and support team 
are VERY responsive. Check out some of the questions on the forums at 
http://forum.civicrm.org/

I've got Drupal and CiviCRM running on rtpnet.org, as NCCommunities.org 
and have tested hosting other sites under the one installation. I set up 
NCLA.NCCommunities.org as an information exchange site for literacy 
agencies across the state of North Carolina, running under 
NCCommunities.org -- sort of a private, intranet. They like it and have 
started building content. Any domain name will work for hosting. My 
hopes are that RTPnet will be able to expand its services for nonprofit 
organizations by offering hosting for Drupal/CiviCRM at its current 
rates of $100/year.

Some of us with RTPnet have been wondering if we could develop templates 
for a few categories of organizations, like churches, environmental 
groups, etc. Currently, most of the RTPnet folks are busy with other 
things and haven't had time to learn much Drupal/CiviCRM and we're 
hesitant to offer a new hosting service based only on my skills -- I 
haven't done anything in php or MySQL and am NOT a system administrator, 
though I have good backup help when I get stuck. I've wondered if there 
are folks on this list who might like to get involved in some kind of 
Drupal/CiviCRM support. I should note that I do NOT have CiviMail 
running on rtpnet.org. I don't think I can set that up myself.

In any case, if you'd like to set up a test site for your church on 
rtpnet.org, I'd be glad to help get it started, as Drupal only or with 
CiviCRM. Perhaps there are others who would also like to help.

Judy Hallman, RTPnet volunteer
-----------------------------

Susan LaBarre wrote:
> Hi All,
>  
> I searched the IW archives and could not find any earlier postings on 
> the topic of CMS applications.
>  
> Does anyone have experience with configuring CMS enabled websites? Our 
> church technology team is planning an overhaul of our current website 
> and we are looking into using an open source CMS portal for a more 
> interactive experience. Our team has website design, CSS, javascript, 
> and MySQL expertise but none of us has ever used a CMS solution. We are 
> looking for recommendations on which SW to use.
>  
> Ease of use with good data security would be high priorities. We're 
> looking at Go Daddy hosting and they offer Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, and 
> Moodle. I suppose we could also do a manual install by our database 
> person for any open source package. There are so many apps out there: 
> the good, the bad and the downright ugly. 
>  
> Advice and recommendations would be greatly appreciated, on or offline. 
>  
> Thanks in advance.
>  
> Susan
>  
> *The Green Gifting Campaign*
> www.green-gifting.net <http://www.green-gifting.net/>
> info AT green-gifting.net <mailto:info AT green-gifting.net>
> ** 
> *~a public service campaign *
> *for earth friendly gift giving~*
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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