What can you do with Drupal?
- Maintain and edit a simple site
A simple installation of Drupal allows someone with little or no knowledge of html to maintain and edit a site. The TinyMCE editor gives WYSIWYG editing of content much like a word processor. Select some text, click on the B button and hey presto, your text has become bold.
- Publicise your News and Events
A very simple events module puts your events into a calendar that you can share. Classify an item as news and see it appear in a block of recent news items on your front page and if that's not pushing it enough, you can also publish it through RSS to all your subscribers.
- Publish a newsletter
The simple news module allows you publish a newletter, manage subscriptions to it and archive old issues with very straightforward configuration.
- Organise your content in different ways
Some Content Management Systems force your content into a hierarchy. One of Drupal's key strengths is its taxonomy structure which allows you to classify your content in any way you like - and as many different ways as you like. A good example is that you can lable something with a colour (red, green, blue) and a size (big, medium, small). These can be hierarchical if you want (so blue could have subcategories of azure, cobalt, denim, navy, etc) or not. They can also be open ended, so you add to them as you go. In this case, when you start typing, the system will complete your word with suggestions that are already used. E.g. prussian.
Maybe a better example would be that you can classify your content by section (news/features/resources),
topic (sustainability/accessibility/funding)
access (public/subscribers/staff)
Which means your website can act as an intranet as well.
- Interact with users through blogs, comments & forums
When you hear people talking about Web 2.0, they really mean getting your users involved in producing or reacting to content. Drupal has a powerful built in threaded comment feature that makes blogs and forums just work out of the box. With the fine-grained permissions that can be allocated to different user roles, it easy to allow registered users to do things like post to forums, comment on blogs, submit job vacancies, upload files and photos and much much more.
- Create a Community, Campaign, Newspaper,...
Some great sites based on Drupal are these things and more. Greenpeace UK, Amnesty International, The UN's End Poverty and Fight Hunger sites all use Drupal as do some major newspapers like the New York Observer, Die Welt, Die Zeit and The Onion. Drupal even runs some sites at organisations as diverse as NASA, NATO and MTV; The Grateful Dead, Ozzy Osbourne and Britney Spears also use it. Here's a really good list of Drupal sites.
- Produce a presentation - like this
This article is part of a presentation created for Social Source South West. Through the use of simple formatting, these full handout notes are available online but only the main points display in the slide show. You can view the actual presentation through this link.
- Integrate with CiviCRM
There is a fairly simple integration between the two systems that allows your Drupal users to add their details to your CiviCRM database. It also allows you to expose parts of your CRM database through the Drupal web site so that people can search for details that you allow over the web. This level of tie in between the two systems provides a very powerful tool for your organisation to engage with, connect and activate your membership, constituents and supporters.
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