School District Site - Design Opinions Wanted

[JN From Paducah]

I am technology director for a school district in Kentucky. The district's current website (http://www.paducah.k12.ky.us) is running on an (old) proprietary CMS system running on Microsoft IIS. This summer we are going to move to Joomla running on Apache. We are going to take the opportunity of the move to do a complete redesign of the site. Currently we are surveying our users (students, parents, staff, etc.) and will base many of our design decisions on that input.

There is one area of our site, Classroom Connections, that I would love to get opnions from the Joomla community as to the best way to organize and design. Our district has 6 schools with about 230 teachers. Currently, each teacher has Classroom Connections page where they post homework assignments, upcoming events, etc.

In our new design, each school (probably) will be a section with categories for news, contact info, lunch menus, etc. We want parents to be able to quickly get to the teachers' Classroom Connections pages with a minimum number of clicks. In other words, if I am a parent and come to the district home page, I would click on a school name in a menu which would take me to that school's section. From there, I would then like to see/display a list of all of the teachers in that school (30-40 names), click on a name, and immediately go to the teacher's Classroom Connections page.

From the teacher's point of view, we would like for the teacher to be able to log in to the system and be able to easily (one click preferably) edit their own Classroom Connections 'page'.

So how would you set that up? Would you simply make each teacher a category in that school's section? Would you create static content pages for each teacher? Or would you . . .

Any thoughts, comments, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jeff Nelson
Paducah, KY

[Firefly]

If I were you, I'd be prepared to muck about a bit as you try out various ideas 

The one-click for teachers idea could be implemented through a menu link to a user list, assuming that only teachers are registered. There's a module for that. Or... hmmm... user a homepage component, with each teacher getting a homepage (one link off menu to a list of homepages). I use UHP, though others are as good.

For the rest, I think you've already got a good approach.

[mcsmom]

You can use community builder--you can set it so that the login redirects to the profile. Then the profile can have tabs for the teacher's blog, the teacher's homepage, gallery, content etc.

[JN From Paducah]

Thanks, guys, a couple of good ideas for me to futz around with. Anyone else?

Jeff Nelson
Paducah, KY

[JN From Paducah]

firefly,
I got UHP installed and it looks like it will do just what I need. It also appears that the new version will have some neat additional functionality. By the way, the only thing I would like to do differently is to display (from a menu probably) a subset of the user list (e.g. just the teachers at one school). Got any ideas how I might do that other than manually creating the list from the user IDs?

mcsmom,
Community builder looks pretty neat. More complex than I need right now. I am going to set up a test bed version of the website and then reinstall CB and fool around with it.

Thanks, both.

I'm still open to comments from anyone else.

Jeff Nelson
Paducah, KY

[compass]

Actually, I would do something different , I would give each school their own website, running each on its own subdomain, or folder. I am setting something up like that here:

http://www.straffordweb.net
http://www.straffordweb.net/artworks
http://www.straffordweb.net/morrilllibrary

I am using Multisite Pro, it allows you to sync/update anything across your sites, users, templates, content. It seems pretty powerful, tricky to get a handle on though.

[JN From Paducah]

Thanks, Barrie. Actually, that was a model I was thinking of. However, being that we are a small district (less than 3000 students and only 6 schools) and that I'm a relative newbie to Joomla , I think I'll keep it simple at this time. I will take a look at Multisite when I have some time.

For our Classroom Connections I'm probably going to use UHP. I'll have one menu link from the district page to the UHP page for all of the teachers in the district. Then, at each school page, I'll manually create a page for that school and just list the teachers with a direct link to their UHP page. Not that big of a chore with only about 230 teachers.

By the way, I just registered at your site yesterday and read the Template Tutorial last night. Good stuff, thanks.

Jeff Nelson
Paducah, KY

[researchtoxic]

I am in a similar boat. My school uses Final Site and it is very difficult for someone who is not technical savvy but what is good about it is that a teacher can load its on documents to show on their own homepage. It seem with Joomla that each use couldnt have say separate instaneces of Docman.

Our major problem is adding events to calenders which I know Joomla can handle easily. Can we keep discussing this because if this can by used in school management it woiuld be huge!!! and free which schools need.

[compass]

Good stuff, thanks

*thumbsup*

[php4ever]

oooops doubled on me

[php4ever]

There is one area of our site, Classroom Connections, that I would love to get opnions from the Joomla community as to the best way to organize and design. Our district has 6 schools with about 230 teachers. Currently, each teacher has Classroom Connections page where they post homework assignments, upcoming events, etc.

In our new design, each school (probably) will be a section with categories for news, contact info, lunch menus, etc. We want parents to be able to quickly get to the teachers' Classroom Connections pages with a minimum number of clicks. In other words, if I am a parent and come to the district home page, I would click on a school name in a menu which would take me to that school's section. From there, I would then like to see/display a list of all of the teachers in that school (30-40 names), click on a name, and immediately go to the teacher's Classroom Connections page.

Thanks,
Jeff Nelson
Paducah, KY

Jeff, I'd honestly avoid using community builder in that situation.  Granted CB is a nice product but using it for a project of that size will beat your server up in performance.  CB is ideal for sites with no traffic or minimal traffic and if you are talking about thousands of students and an entire school district dont walk, run from that idea.

I did a project for a school district where the district had thousands (1,000's) of pages we needed to hand convert to work in a CMS type environment and a custom template engine was built to accomodate that.  But JOOMLA and a product called MOODLE where used in some situations like you are talking about.  We almost went the route that "compass" mentions but after testing it we quickly realized that would not work from the perspective of this situation because Joomla (although nice) chokes heavily when quasi methods to bring things together start breaking as in the case of some Joomla/vBulliten hacks we've ran into.

For our project, the districts issues was centered around the fact that many department heads would go psycho with pages and content according to how they saw fit which meant that each page could be as different from the next with absolutely no consistency.  Then you compound that problem with wanting to do what you are trying and you get a management nightmare that will grow to be a monster if not carefully done. I mean the situation was identical to yours in respect to profile management.

The solution we went with was a custom community solution that simply "HACKS" the joomla core to feature what you were after. Then we removed all the WYSIWYG editors and replaced it with a set of forms.  The forms had presets such as Department, Title, Header, Content, etc. that way each department could have a style sheet that defaulted regardless of how creative a teacher or staff member wanted to get.  This stopped the teachers from centering all the text on the page and outright prevented purple or red headers for instance that left the previous site an absolute messy joke. Once a style guide was created (the first part) then all else followed in sync.  That included what documents a teacher had power to upload, the format, the layout of the page, everything was made to where they had no creative input for updating content, they simply filled in forms.

Now please understand that this is really not a far fetched concept idea as you may first believe.  The fact is that this method has been used by the magazine and news paper industry for years and years.  Its not uncommon for higher market magazines to maintain a database where writers and designers submit content in a formatted method that a page assembly program like Quark Express or InDesign couldn't just populate its pages with DB content.  Its done all the time. Its the best way to do it for newspaper classifieds, because hand editing with a cut-n-paste method would be a two day job for a daily publication and thats not realistic.

So although the people above have given you valid and honest feedback which we greatly respect. But I'm telling you from the perspective of experience in working with school districts as a regular consultant.  I'd avoid CB in your case and opt for a custom solution that works specific to your needs.

I hope that helps

Jared

[JN From Paducah]

bjraines,
I'm looking at several components to make our site both easy to use for our teachers and useful for our parents. I was tempted by a good looking commercial product, mamboSchools by oneTechnologies (http://www.onetechnologies.com/). Not unreasonably priced, but we just don't want to go to a fully hosted model. For schools that want to use that model, it could be good solution.

Jeff Nelson
Paducah Public Schools

[JN From Paducah]

jared,
Some excellent points. I'd love to involve a consultant but the district is cutting $1M out of the budget and my resources for new website development are nil. I sure appreciate the input, though.

Thanks
Jeff Nelson
Paducah Public Schools

[php4ever]

jared,
Some excellent points. I'd love to involve a consultant but the district is cutting $1M out of the budget and my resources for new website development are nil. I sure appreciate the input, though.

Thanks
Jeff Nelson
Paducah Public Schools

Hey pal, I fully understand, with every other job going to third world nations I'm surprised many school districts dont use toilet paper as notebook paper.  LOL

I wish you the best on your project and please keep in mind that if you need a little guidence I'd be happy to send you some things from my archives.


Jared

[mcsmom]

It seem with Joomla that each use couldnt have say separate instaneces of Docman.

I make a docoman category for each class or subject (that way if teachers change you don't have to redo everything. (Also a content page, a gallery category, a calendar, link to homework journal (my name for mamblog)).
Then I have a menu for each class/subject.

I don't find using community builder to be complicated at all. It also can be used to make class lists. In fact it can pretty easily be used to replace the menu I described above. Each teacher can have a gallery tab, a contact information tab, a homework journal tab, user homepage tab etc. Each student can have a different set of tabs, even easier now in the new version of cb.

[JN From Paducah]

Wow! Thanks, mcsmom. After reading your post, I checked your school's site, wow again. I'm going to install CB and start playing with it. Your site and what you have described is exactly what I would like to do for our Paducah school's community.  I'm a relative newbie to Joomla, do you mind if I email you occasionally or should all questions be here on the forum?

Thanks,
Jeff Nelson
Paducah Public Schools

[researchtoxic]

This is a very good thread. It would be nice if we could collaborate on a site recipe for schools that anyone could set up. I know we could find it useful as well as others. I really like the docman idea above.....wish userhomepages was a little more developed....please PM or email me any comments or keep the Joomla for Education thread alive.

[mcsmom]

That would be really useful.

[researchtoxic]

Yeah I agree. I wouldn't mind hosting the discussion or project(s). I have been gleefully playing with Joomla for a while with no real purpose.  I am a teacher and would love to use it for good. If there is some interest please communictae it to me.

[cecgodoy]

Hi.

Could you please suggest a demo?

I would like to know how to use the community builder, learning with examples.

Thank you.

You can use community builder--you can set it so that the login redirects to the profile. Then the profile can have tabs for the teacher's blog, the teacher's homepage, gallery, content etc.

[compass]

jared,
Some excellent points. I'd love to involve a consultant but the district is cutting $1M out of the budget and my resources for new website development are nil. I sure appreciate the input, though.

Actually, I think this tool exists. Igor built it for Porsche Brazil and it can be found in the extensions site. Its called simple news. Its NOT a component and there is no English documentation.