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I've been reading forums and checking links for schools but I'm not seeing anything like what I may be needing to accomplish.

I have been asked to look into the possibility of seeting up our local school district with Joomla.  I am new to Joomla but can see that it should be able to accomplish most of what they need.

My first concern is this:  There needs to be one distict section (home page area) where the information that applies to all of the schools (calendar, school board info, superintendents message etc would go. 

From that section, there would be links to the 7 school in our district. Each school would then have it's own set of buttons going to their contact list, event calendars  for clubs, sports etc., shool news, possibly teach pages where they can post homework, club pages, school rules, photos, etc, etc.  Each school would need to have it's own set of information and I would also like for it to be very obvious which school section they are looking at (possbily a different header with the school name and mascot and background color for each being different.)

I've seen plenty of individual schools that are great, but I'm not seeing a lot of districts that provide the individual school information in a way that I would like.  Any suggestions for how I would achieve this?  I of course would want to map everything out from the start so I have a plan of attack.

http://www.madisonschools.k12.va.us/  I like this site - clean, easy to get around but when I click on the individual school links, I don't see any change in the look of the page and really couldn't tell that the info I was seeing was for any particular school.

Any help getting started would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Lynette

Hi Lynette!

I think you will be very happy with the ease of use of Joomla and your schools will find it fun to work with. There are quite a few people here with K-12 school sites that really look great. Many are fairly active in the forums.

IMO, I would go with eight different websites, one for the district and one for each school. Since each school will likely have (or start with) about the same configuration, I would recommend designing your basic school website; then, backup the database. Install your other school websites using Joomla! and restore the backed up database for each location.

Once you have the seven school sites, the customization for each location could begin.

Since schools typically operate locally on updates/calendars/activities, etc., I think during the school year, this would provide your best security/access method as each school would only have update ability to their own website.

Good-luck,
Amy

FYI: I see that Rey (one of the magnificent Developers we have!) posted a NUMBER of school websites < http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,35462.0.html >

Amy,

Yes, I went through that list of school links yesterday hoping to see something that was just what I was thinking.
Your suggestion to set up each school indpendently makes sense - and  using the first as a template would really cut down on the set up time.

If each of the web sites had a common top menu system that linked to all of the other schools, I could then still have a vertical menu that would link to all of that particular school's information.  I would ultimately like to see people from each of the schools being responsible for maintaining differeent areas of their site but I think that I'd have to get it all set up first - maybe start now and have it up before the Fall  semester starts in August.  That would give me a chance to get it built, figure out the kinks, and possibly train some people to help with maintenance.

Do you think that the blogs are the best way to go for the teachers to post homework and such?