Just inherited our school's website... what should I replace frontpage with?

Yep, that's right. Our school webpage is currently still using frontpage for all of the school and teacher pages. It's out of date, obnoxious to use, and just flat out not a good way to do things anymore with so many quality cms solutions.

So what is everyone using these days? From what I have found out, the tech coordinator is not wanting to give server access to teachers for updating their sites on their own. They want to be able to check it over first before publishing. As of right now I am thinking along the lines of Wordpress MU and setting the teachers to contributors. Thoughts?

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Permalink Reply by Gary Miller on November 29, 2007 at 9:57pm

I do our school website using Dreamweaver. Our teachers use Wikispaces for their pages. Easy to use, can update from anywhere and isn't on your school server.

Nice to know our school isn't the only one with IT Nazis. Is it about the power? Or is it that they just don't know any better?

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Permalink Reply by Scott Walker on November 29, 2007 at 10:08pm

It's my thought that they figure teachers aren't smart enough to follow the rules, so rather than train us, they regulate it this way. Now that I have some say in the matter we'll ditch the frontpage and move towards something more user friendly. This way instead of spending training time on how to use frontpage, we can focus more on the content that should or shouldn't be published.

Thanks for the tip by the way. Dreamweaver is a good thought.

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Permalink Reply by nlowell on November 30, 2007 at 4:54am

Nvu (http://nvudev.com) is a free alternative to dreamweaver. Does a really good job of writing clean code and has the integrated uploads so you can save your work onto a server without the extra step of having to upload it using a different application.

Oh, and it's free, did I mention that?

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Permalink Reply by Martha on May 7, 2008 at 7:12am

wow, I sure can use that!! thanks for the tip!

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Permalink Reply by Ed Jones on November 30, 2007 at 5:46am

How good is your CSS? Dreamweaver is very powerful, and I've used it steadily for 5+years(?). But you do need to know your CSS well to make it work right.

That said, the newest version couples, in theory, very nicely with Fireworks. So you can sketch together a site in Fireworks, and export it to Dreamweaver for further tweaking.

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Permalink Reply by Terry Smith on November 30, 2007 at 7:34pm

I use Front Page, Claris Home Page, and basic code editing for our main page to display events, awards, schedules, etc, but teacher classroom pages are all external links using whatever they choose so everyone is free to update/edit any time.

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Permalink Reply by Gary on November 30, 2007 at 2:05am

We have been using Joomla for about a year after using a mixture of Dreamweaver and Golive. You would be able to set up users that had write only permission with someone overseeing the publishing end of things if they were paranoid about what their colleagues were posting. We have that kind of setup for students posting student council information, although they have not used that yet.

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on November 30, 2007 at 6:55am

I think the easiest CMS out there is Plone which is what we use. However, I've also used Joomla, Moodle, Xoops,and those work out great as well.

I hear Drupal is another great one which some school districts use.

For our staff we have them trained to use either Plone or iweb (being a mac district).

http://plone.org/

ex, of school page in plone
http://lions.dist57.org/

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Permalink Reply by Gary on November 30, 2007 at 8:46am

Plone looks interesting. When we were looking we looked at Drupal and Joomla and went with Joomla. We also use Moodle and Wordpress.

Should have left some examples;

School Page

Wordpress as a CMS

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Permalink Reply by Zach Vander Veen on November 30, 2007 at 11:27am

I highly recommend CMS Made Simple. You can design the structure of your site using your favorite editor (NVU, Dreamweaver, Whatever) and then install your code into CMSmadesimple. Adding content is incredibly easy.

Teachers can be put in charge of 1 page (or group of pages). It's all web based. No software is required for their computer. I've found it to be significantly easier than Joomla, Drupal, Contribute, and the like (it's also open source and free).

Like most things, there's a bit of a learning curve with the set up. Still, I found it to be relatively simple.

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Permalink Reply by Scott Walker on November 30, 2007 at 1:49pm

Wow. CMS Made Simple does link good. So let me get this straight. It appears that you create the layout and it provides the css, so that through the admin you decide what content appears on the page?