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Good stuff, thanks

php4ever wrote:

JN From Paducah wrote: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 wrote: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

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

mcsmom wrote: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.

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.