Wednesday NECC Session 1

Wednesday morning I got into the first workshop of the day (8:30AM) with 2 minutes to spare. The traffic had been crazy coming in that morning and I was lucky to get a seat in the workshop. It was in the back leaning up against a table but at least I had a place to put my laptop. This workshop was called Drupal: Content Management or the Web 2.0 World. The address for the information is: http://core.gilbert.k12.az.us/other/necc/. This session was all about Drupal which is an open source content management suite which you can edit to your specs. I know very little about Drupal so it was an interesting session. You can tie this front end into a back end database like PHP or MySQL to house all your data. Basically, the presenter showed his site that was set up with a wiki, podcast, and blogging components already installed and working and then showed the Drupal interface as it comes to you (if you click on the link for the information you will be at a wiki site from the interface). We walked through some of the installation issues and then discussed a couple of sites of interest. Apparently there is a version of Drupal created for education that has several of the usual components already installed and configured. If interested, check out the site http://www.opensourcecms.com/. This site gives you the ability to play with open source software without worrying about breaking things. Every two hours the software gets refreshed and all the work is wiped out. So, no worries about breaking anything. Of course, keep good notes because in two hours the software gets refreshed and all the work gets wiped out.