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Drupal: A content management framework
February 16, 2010 by christian · Leave a Comment
Although Drupal is often described as a “content management system” (CMS) it is also a “content management framework” (CMF). In other words, unlike a typical CMS, it is geared more towards configurability and customization. Picture a range of measurement where one end of the scale is labeled “specific” and the other end “abstract”. On the “specific” end of the spectrum, you would have something whose form is very specialized because it’s meant for a specific purpose—like, say, a hammer. On the other end of the spectrum, you would have something much more abstracted, that is available to be configured any way you like, for a variety of purposes—like some wood and a chunk of steel. You could make a hammer, or any number of other things with the wood and steel.
Of course, while chunks of wood and steel are more “configurable” than a hammer, they aren’t terribly useful because few people have the specialized knowledge to work with such raw materials. Drupal’s purpose is to sit in the sweet spot between the two ends of the scale, and create a sort of “builder’s kit” made up of pre-designed components that can be used as-is or can be extensively reconfigured to suit your needs. Its design provides incredible flexibility while still allowing people who aren’t programmers to make powerful websites. This principle of manageable abstraction is important to understand, because it is a central concept to all things Drupal. When you understand why a measured amount of abstraction is valuable, you’ll begin to understand why this approach is such a strong argument for using Drupal
Website: http://drupal.org/
Mahara: Open source e-portfolio system
February 12, 2010 by christian · Leave a Comment
Mahara is an open source e-portfolio system with a flexible display framework. Mahara, meaning ‘think’ or ‘thought’ in Te Reo Māori, is user centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. Mahara also features a weblog, resume builder and social networking system, connecting users and creating online learner communities.
A first guiding principle with the development of the Mahara ePortfolio system is that it is learner centred – a form of Personal Learning Environment. This is in contrast to the more institution-centric Learning Management System (LMS).
Mahara is a stand-alone system that can be integrated into a wider virtual learning framework. Unlike some pundits, we believe the Learning Management System remains a highly useful application for delivering learning. We also believe the overall environment can be enhanced and complemented by a learner-centred personal learning environment such as Mahara. Pan-institutional learner communities can also be encouraged using Mahara.
Mahara’s architecture is inspired by the modular, extensible architecture of Moodle. The Mahara team has also been heavily involved in the Moodle community, with recent work mostly focused on Moodle Networks. Similarly, Mahara systems can be networked together as well having single sign-on from Moodle 1.9 upwards. In a sense, we see Mahara as a ‘sister’ application although the two systems are not required to go together.
Going forward, Mahara will continue to evolve as a ‘pluggable’, modular ePortfolio system designed to leverage Web 2.0 web services and built with interoperability in mind.
Website: http://mahara.org/
Joomla: Content Management (CMS)
January 26, 2010 by christian · Leave a Comment
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
Website: http://www.joomla.org
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The goal of this website is to give an end to end open source solution for a typical small company including Telephony, Document management, Customer Relation Application, Networking, Remote access, Desktop solutions and so on.
Although only the tools/applications have been listed on the website for the moment, a complete network diagram and individual how-to articles will follow.
Please note that for most of the installation instructions, we will not re-invent the wheel. A large number of very competent experts have already written how-to articles, we will just refer you to those. We will only document the missing links between the different components or if we feel that some installations could be better documented.
The KinDev team.
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Please note that the text for each of the blog post is taken from their respective websites. The KinDev team have experimented with those tools at different occasions. Your need and requirements could be different than the ones identified by our team for a specific situation, please take the time to read and understand the tool/application features before starting to install in a production environment.
We hope that you will have as much fun as we have discovering, installing and using those tools/applications and please do not forget to donate to the respective open source volunteers that have changed the IT landscape for ever.
The KinDev team.