Assignment 3--Interview Transcript

For Assignment 3, I chose to interview Owen Leonard from the Athens County Public Library. The Athens County Public Library consists of seven library buildings serving the community of Nelsonville, Ohio. The library website offers services such as catalog searching, individual user accounts and renewals, and links to 24/7 chat reference services. Their website can be found at http://www.myacpl.org/.

The interview transcript is as follows:

How and where did you hear about content management systems?

I've been doing web development for 15 years, so I don't know when I first heard of CMSes. I remember experimenting with PostNuke and PHPnuke years ago.

What were your motivations to adopt a content management system for its  current use (your library website, and any other purpose)?

The primary reason was to open up the opportunity for other users to contribute to the site. We had a good working site before, and I felt that it was well-maintained. But when it came time to do a full redesign it seemed short-sighted not to adopt a CMS at the same time.

What were your decision making criteria in choosing a CMS? What is the name of CMS you are using now?

We are using Drupal. I chose Drupal after evaluating it, Joomla, and Plone. I chose Drupal because it seemed to be the most flexible in terms of design customization, offered a wide array of add-on modules,
was under active development, and seemed to have a strong support community. Being written in PHP was another advantage of Drupal, since I know PHP and could expect to be working at some level with Drupal code.

What are the important benefits or advantages of the CMS that you are using now over the old system or another CMS system you may have used in the past? How was the learning curve?

I find Drupal's templating system to be powerful and flexible, allowing me to take an existing template and adapt it to make a site that is unique to my library. There are a wide variety of standards-compliant, CSS-based templates available for free, and the markup Drupal generates is reasonably sane.

I found Joomla to be very similar to Drupal in terms of basic functionality, but my impression was that customizing the design would not be as easy. Plone has excellent site structure management, but
offers no easy means of customization and appears to have no active user community on the web.

Drupal seemed to be a better choice than Wordpress because it was less a blog-oriented system than a site-building system, although Drupal comes up short when you want to incorporate simple blogging tools.

Drupal does have a learning curve, and users who are not familiar with at least some PHP might find it difficult to get started. It took me a while to get a good understanding of how Drupal's system of pages and menus worked. A user looking for better out-of-the-box functionality would probably be better served by something simpler like Wordpress.

You stated that you chose to use a CMS in order to open the site up to other contributors. Do you feel that it has served this purpose? Are others contributing to the site? If so, what types of staff members contribute?

This is a difficult question to answer, because for Drupal to have been a success in this regard would have also required us to be successful in delegating the work of updating the site. This we have
not done. The framework for collaboration is in place, but the personnel-side of things is not.

What kind of training, if any, did you offer to staff?

Because of the previous answer, the answer here is: none yet.

Have you had any major problems using Drupal? If so, were you able to resolve these problems?

I find Drupal upgrades to be tedious. I don't know that *any* CMS offers seamless upgrades. Wordpress probably comes the closest, with its automatic upgrade option. I have run into problems when performing
upgrades, so I have to test upgrades thoroughly. This has the unfortunate consequence of discouraging me from upgrading often.

The other difficulty I have is less with Drupal than with my understanding of how to extend Drupal to match my needs. I find myself still using much of the framework of our previous, home-grown site and
displaying information within our Drupal site by using custom PHP. I would be smarter to develop a method of using Drupal's built-in content types to display the data.