Drupal & Web 2.0

CMS Workshop Survey

Emily Frazier — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:47:36 -0500

Please complete the survey, being as honest as you can. I hope to make this workshop better, so I appreciate any/all comments.

Drupal & Web 2.0

What is PegSpace?

Emily Frazier — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:55:04 -0500

PEGspace is an initiative on behalf of the Alliance for Community Media to help access centers best use the internet to further the mission of public media. The project is designed to coordinate PEG-specific development efforts and help PEG centers migrate to a Drupal content management system. You will find a mass of helpful resources available on PegSpace which include more info on Drupal, CivicSpace, Content Management Systems, and connections to other PEG centers across the country.

Drupal & Web 2.0

What is Drupal?

Emily Frazier — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:06:15 -0500

Have you seen this face before? If not, get familiar with it. It's the Drupal logo.

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. - Drupal.org

Drupal is becoming widely adopted throughout the PEG community due to easy-to-use and easy-to-customize nature.
Here are just a few access-related websites:
http://vermontaccess.net
http://www.cctvcambridge.org
http://www.mnn.org
http://mappingaccess.com
http://deproduction.org
http://ourchannels.org
http://pegspace.org

Do all Drupal websites have to look like, well, so "Drupalesque"? No! Take a look at some of these Drupal sites:
http://www.mtv.co.uk/
http://www.activeliving.org/
http://content.foxsearchlight.com/videos
http://www.westcoasthotyoga.com/
http://reachpotential.in/
http://ilign.com/
http://www.auc-nuc.ca/
http://appel.nasa.gov/

Please visit drupal.org/about to learn more about Drupal and if it's right for you.

Drupal & Web 2.0

What About CiviCRM?

Emily Frazier — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:08:21 -0500

CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized constituent relationship management software --- designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

Integration with both Drupal and Joomla content management systems gives you the tools to connect, communicate and activate your supporters and constituents. - CiviCRM.org

You can use it in conjunction with a Drupal website to track contacts and create dynamic forms for things like membership, classes/events, donations, and more. You can export your contacts both to email programs and to other programs like Excel. You can also generate a variety of reports to help you better understand the flow of your organization.

You can tag your contacts for easy-look ups and tracking, and you can also group your contacts automatically based on a tag. Here's an example: Let's say you are a PEG Access center and you have full-time employees, part-time employees, and volunteers. You could create three tags -- one for each of the above type of workers. So for each full-time employee, you would check off the tag that corresponds and so on. Then you can easily do a search if you want to find all of your part-time employees at once and send them an email. But what about if you want to send ALL of your workers an email? You could do a search for all three types....or you can have each of those tags automatically track to a bigger group called "All Staff". This allows you to easily and quickly narrow or broaden your search with just one click.

But what about privacy? With CiviCRM, you can use your Drupal roles to allow or restrict access to certain groups of people. So if you have a Drupal access role called "Staff", then you can choose to allow your staff members to see all or some groups of your CiviCRM contacts, but you can restrict other roles -- like public users -- from seeing CiviCRM at all.

You can also track appointments, phone calls, and emails with CiviCRM. You can also send large mailing-list type emails from CiviCRM to your contacts using either text-based or html-based emails. CiviCRM is also easy to integrate with PayPal for financial transactions. For example, if you want to provide membership services at your PEG center, you can create a membership form and have your clients pay through PayPal which is automatically integrated into the form for you.

And don't forget mailing labels! Yes, you can print out mailing labels for any contact from CiviCRM directly.

Here is how a search result listing is displayed:

Here is a simple interface for inserting a contact:

You can try it out for yourself! Go to http://demo.civicrm.org/drupal/ then log in with a username 'demo' and a password 'demo'. Then click the "CiviCRM" link on the left, and off you go!

Drupal & Web 2.0