Small non-profits are in a bind. Despite the fact that they are small, they often need skilled technical services be it for computers or the need of a website. They are often staffed by volunteers who may have limited time or technical skills yet they need access to people with those technical skills and the time to help them.

Generic history

In small groups, their first website exists because someone figures out how to get a basic website up and they go on from there. Traditionally if someone wants an update, they need 'Bob' or 'Jane', the web person to hand edit and update the sites content. In smaller groups, often the person who is responsible and first put up the site is busy so things get delayed then missed, etc.... There is a bottleneck. Real life emergencies, drifting interests, volunteer burn out, all effect the life of a site. Neglect builds up and deterioration sets in.

If a group gets lucky and a skilled professional helps them out then they can have some valued services. But what happens when it's a custom CMS? What happens when that developer moves on? Then the sites custom features no longer get updated, the next person may not be familiar with the language, back end.... The site again suffers from neglect. The group fails to get it's message out.

Back to present

Recently some friends took their groups (KHTI) site off line, they felt their content was so outdated that it was better to be off line then on.

I saw it was off line so I offered to help. They said they'd keep the offer in mind. I tossed together a quick demo site using Drupal.

It took me only a an hour to create the demo site. I added a sub domain off my existing domain in DNS, leveraged my existing Drupal code base install with the multi-site capabilities, added an entry in Apache, ran through the Drupal install wizard, turned on a few already installed modules... That took 15 minutes. The rest of the time was spent digging up old content from archive.org, a quick modification of old faithful Blue Marine and sent a link with my thoughts on what I could provide.

What Drupal allows me to offer them;

• They own the content and content can be updated from a web browser. No need to wait on a webmaster to update, change or modify content, the responsibility can be distributed to multiple people.
• I will send full monthly back ups to someone so that if I get hit by a bus, distracted, wander off, they should be able to get their site with their content back up in a short amount of time. After all, the content is the most important part of a site.
• A Content Management System that doesn't have a license cost and that is maintained by hundreds, if not thousands of people with documentation instead of custom code.

A few weeks later, they took me up on my offer. I spent some time discussing what they wanted and we settled on getting started with a basic site with their information and a FAQ. We will add more features later.

Modules used

• CCK
• Date
• Help
• Menu
• Path
• Statistics
• Taxonomy
• Tracker
• Upload
• BUEditor
• Diff
• SimpleMenu (for admin view only)
• Update Status
• Views
• Views UI

They had a FAQ on their old site which was several static HTML, hand edited pages. I used CCK and views to replicate and automate this somewhat. I created a new node type called FAQ;
Description: This content type is for Frequently Asked Questions.
Title field label: Question
Body field label: Answer
Work flow is Published with Create new revision checked.

I created a taxonomy of terms, made the FAQ content type required to have a term. Now the non-profits members can add to the FAQ at anytime. I created a several views for each category, aliased the pages and sent them a link to review. They were able to log in and correct somethings right then with out needing to wait. Created a role for the contributors so they can modify content but not the structure of the site.

I get to present this to the rest of the group this weekend and then get feedback on what features they would like added on next. My guess is a way for people to submit land leads that can then have a follow up publicly available to them. Maybe see if anyone is artistic and wants to suggest an updated theme too.

For a few hours work the KHTI site is back online. Due to Drupal's flexibility, I can add content now and if necessary re-arrange, un-publish, add content/features and change the theme with very little effort. But for now, at least their site is back online.

Drupal is a great content management system. It's most powerful ability is that it allows you to give people control of their content and remove that old traditional bottleneck role of the web master.