Free as in Kittens: Using Open-Sourced Software to Run Your Library Website

Content management systems provide libraries with an easy yet powerful way to manage their websites. They allow anyone with basic tech skills to create web content quickly and easily. Come hear how the Tenn-Share Web Committee, possessing a wide range of tech skills, worked together to redesign their website in Drupal.

This presentation is sponsored by Tenn-Share and is part of the 2009 TLA Conference.

Friday, April 10, 2009 at 2:35 p.m.

Resources

Support

• Drupal Handbook:  http://drupal.org/handbooks
• Drupal Forums:  http://drupal.org/forum
• Drupal Books:  http://drupal.org/books.  Books we've used and found to be helpful:
  • Building Powerful and Robust Sites with Drupal 6 by David Mercer [link].  Perfect for beginners.
  • Learning Drupal 6 Module Development by Matt Butcher [link].  Great if you are wanting to write your own themes and modules.  Advanced.
  • Pro Drupal Development (2nd ed.) by John K. VanDyk [link].  For the very abitious among us.  Very advanced.
• Drupal Videos:
  • http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/videocasts
  • http://www.doitwithdrupal.com
• Drupal Consulting:
  • http://www.lullabot.com
  • http://acquia.com/
• example of an issue tracker for the CCK module:  http://drupal.org/project/issues/cck?status=All

Contributed Modules Tenn-Share Is Using

• CAPTCHA:   http://drupal.org/project/captcha
• CCK:   http://drupal.org/project/cck
• Date:   http://drupal.org/project/date
• Diff:  http://drupal.org/project/diff
• FCKEditor:   http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor
• Freelinking:  http://drupal.org/project/freelinking
• Image:  http://drupal.org/project/image
• IMCE:  http://drupal.org/project/imce
• Menu Breadcrumb:   http://drupal.org/project/menu_breadcrumb
• Views:  http://drupal.org/project/views
• Webform:  http://drupal.org/project/webform
• Wikitools:  http://drupal.org/project/wikitools

Other Great Drupal Resources

How to Build a Wiki in Drupal:
http://cwgordon.com/how-to-create-a-wiki-with-drupal
We used these step-by-step instructions to build our wiki.

Acquia Drupal
http://acquia.com/
This is as close to a 'commercial' solution as you can get with Drupal.  The free Acquia installation of Drupal comes with popular modules already installed and is easier to update since it's all packaged together.  If you move up to their paid services, you can get technical support and/or consulting services.  Acquia was started by Dries Buytaert, creator of and project lead for Drupal.

Zen Theme
http://drupal.org/node/226507
http://drupal.org/project/zen
We used these step-by-step instructions to build our own subtheme of Zen.

Planet Drupal
http://drupal.org/planet
An aggregator of popular Drupal blogs from around the web.

Drupal Dojo
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo
This group will make you "skilled like a ninja" in all things Drupal development.

These can also be found on delicious under the tag tla2009-kittens.