Spec me a content management system for a wittle school

[MarcLister]

So I haz just finished my first half-term at a local school as their ICT and Communications Co-ordinator. The current school site does what it needs to do but was knocked together in a weekend on Frontpage by one of the governors and obviously I need to redesign it. I would code a new site in XHTML & CSS myself as I can do that but I feel the scope of the site is too large for that.

The governor of the site and I had a meeting last week and we discussed what the new site needs to be able to do. He thinks it would be good if the teachers could add content of their own to the site, thus counting out a manually coded site and meaning a CMS is needed, and then perhaps in the future the children themselves (ages 3-11) can blog on the site about stuff they've done in lessons or trips they've been on. We'd also, at some stage, want to be able to upload videos and pictures of childrens' work and trips to give the parents a stake or interest in the site.

I know of the main CMS' such as Plone (used that at Uni), Drupal, Joomla etc. However I wondered if anyone has any thoughts on which of those, or any other CMS', might be suitable for a small school of about 260 students.

I've tried Drupal, Joomla and MODx on my own site by way of evaluating them. I've also downloaded CMS Made Simple, Dragonfly, e107, EECore, PHP Fusion and Textpattern so I can try those out and see which I feel I can work best with and which is the ideal CMS for implementing a new website for us.

Can anyone give me any tips or info on the aforementioned CMS' and which one would suit the school and allow us to let the children blog, us to upload vid and pics, teachers to upload content themselves etc.

[Garp]

Grab a look at Moodle whilst you're at it, it's a bit more of a VLE than a CMS but may be useful or appropriate depending on what you want to achieve.

Be careful with photographs on the web, you'll probably find a lot of parents won't be happy to find pictures of their little munchkins up on line unless they've given express permission (peadophiles, don't you know..), even though they'll happily upload them to flickr themselves :-/

Joomla has long been my preference, but I've been using it since fairly early Mambo days and know it like the back of my hand.

[MarcLister]

We already have Moodle. It is our VLE and we are thinking about merging our VLE and website into one but I would say that is a future target.

I'm aware of the issues with pics and videos online. I'm guessing we'll ask each parent if they are OK with pics of their child going up or not. It would be nice if we could make it so that we have a password protected area with the photos so that parents can view the pics. This is something I'll have to discuss with people such as staff, parents and governors. However I think we won't be uploading pics for quite a while.

Back to Moodle, I'm going to try and theme it over the holidays as it just has a pretty plain and boring default theme right now. Can we give teachers accounts with certain permissions? So that they can add their own content and edit it, but not edit anyone else's content? This is why I'm thinking a specific CMS might be better for us so that we split the VLE and website up.

I've got a Joomla install on my site and I find it quite frustrating and not intuitive at all to set a site up. Simple things like changing the colour scheme and changing the menu names just take longer than I hoped they would. Is the support/manual stuff for Joomla worth looking through or is it a case of learn how to do stuff I want rather than find out how to do it from a manual?

[Garp]

It's been 4 years+ since I last dealt with Moodle, to be honest with you I haven't got a clue :D

[MarcLister]

Haha. :) I'm thinking we won't have the flexibility we'd need with Moodle as its all hosted on the county servers.

A new website we could control the whole CMS ourselves so I want to find a suitable CMS for us. :)

[loki]

What issues have you had with Joomla Marc ?

It has the sufficient functionality that you are after and both from a user and admin point of view

[MarcLister]

Just finding it quite inflexible at the moment. I obviously don't know enough about it and how to do things I want. I'm having trouble finding a manual that explains how to use Joomla.

[loki]

Marc get me on MSN and I will offer you what help I can. Or feel free to ask away. The out of the box support is not the greatest in terms of documentation but once you get your head around it, then it really is very powerful

[MarcLister]

Excellent. I will do. Is it your contact email address in your profile?