5 Weeks to a Social Library starts this week!
Feb 12th, 2007 by Karen
A significant part of my personal insanity the last month has been final preparations for 5 Weeks to a Social Library. Getting everything together has been challenging and exciting and I’m so grateful to be working with such great people on this project. I wanted to talk a little bit about the technologies behind the project because thus far they have worked great for us. I posted a little bit about some of this software I’d been using to get screencasts just right but I also wanted to talk a little be about the other pieces of software that support the project. I want to say up front that I didn’t supply as much of the technical support I promised and am grateful to Heather, Meredith, and Dorothea for picking up the slack.
Drupal - The main 5 Weeks to a Social Library site is running in Drupal. We are using several modules most notably chatroom which adds a chat room feature and aggregator which allows you to create a set of news feeds you want aggregated. There are lots of great features in Drupal below are a few I want to highlight:
- Akismet as a module to deal with comment spam
- Ability for everyone with an account to have a blog
- Ability to edit content in a WYSIWYG editor
- Ability to create threaded discussion forums
- Ability to customize navigation
These are just a few of Drupal’s features. We are not using all of them but thus far what we are using we have been pretty impressed with.
Mediawiki - The wiki for the course is using Mediawiki which hasn’t really be customized much.
You can seem more about the technologies that the participants are using as part of the course on the course wiki.
