Drupal, an open source server based content management system (CMS)   and which we have mentioned here (built in PHP/MySQL technology), can support a wide range of web designing including blogs, community, promotional websites and many more.

Drupal provides easy tools with the help of which various sites can be easily developed. Its minimum requirement and easy installation makes it even more user friendly. Various modules available with Drupal.org further enhance the scope and usability.

Here we are presenting a few modules which can come extremely handy while building a college community website based on Drupal.

Organic Groups

Enable users to create and manage their own ‘groups’. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves.

This module will be helpful in creating groups for members like teachers, students etc. You can even group students according to their class. The advantage of this module is that, we can have group posts that are only visible for those group members.

See the Organic Groups module in action here.

Calendar

This module will display any views date field in calendar formats, including CCK date fields, node created or updated dates, etc. Switch between year, month, and day views. Back and next navigation is also provided for all views.

You might find it useful for posting college events and other stuff to be shown on the calendar.

Video

This module allows users to submit videos to a Drupal site. Video tutorials or other lecture videos can be submitted using this module which would give that broadcasting edge to the community. Watch the video module in action here.

Fivestar

The Five Star voting module adds a clean, attractive voting widget to nodes in Drupal. Its features include,spam protection, jQuery rollover effects, configurable star sets and even support for anonymous voters. This module can come handy for rating the articles submitted by the community members.

SimpleNews

Simplenews publishes and sends newsletters to lists of subscribers. Both anonymous and authenticated users can opt-in to different mailing lists. This module will be useful in posting news and updates on the website.

Answers

This module is some thing like Yahoo answers where student or any member can post a question and others can answer it. There is also an option for points to be given for the person who answers the question fittingly.

JsMath for displaying mathematics with TeX

This module enables the jsMath script for displaying mathematical expressions. Users can enter arbitrary mathematical expressions in their Drupal content by using the standard TeX syntax, including LaTeX and AMSLaTeX. This module can be handy while displaying mathematical expressions.

Guest books

This module provides a site guestbook and individual user guestbooks. Guestbook owners can even delete and comment the guestbook entries. Avatars are shown if they are available.

phpEdu

PhpEdu is a package for managing educational institutions with the ultimate aim of a complete Drupal e-learning solution. It is a set of modules which manage things like admission, academic programmes, faculties, departments, course registrations, online courses, attendance, fees, tests/exercises, academic records, alumni community among others.

Above is only a probable list, to add a new module to your Drupal based site, just download the module zip file and extract it into the modules folder in Drupal CMS. Based on the site requirement there are many modules which can added on to enhance user accessibility.

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

If you want to have the content management system Joomla + extensions and tools in one package now you have it.
The name is Seedling and it makes your life easier when it comes to build or manage your website.
The software installation on your host/server is quickly and easily (2-3 minutes), featuring a customizable template and demo content which you can edit or replace to create your website.
One thing the Seedling folks don’t mention explicitly is what exactly is in the package beside Joomla (which is also not the official release of Joomla Project but a customized version). They just mention “article commenting, advanced image handling, embedded video and more“.

This package is not free though. Seedling + basic support is $49 and Seedling + professonal support is $349 (1 year).

Seedling is built by the people from Design Guru, a Toronto, Canada based company with 5 years experience in using Joomla content management system.
They also maintain a pro-Joomla blog found called Why Joomla where they have more details about Seedling.

Watch a tutorial about using Seedling below

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©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.

Because there are many users of these content management and blog systems – Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpress – the team behind the free open source ad server solution OpenX  started to develop plugins for them.
This will help the users to get the most out of OpenX, ultimately making more money from online advertising.And recently (August 15) the team released those three plugins! Below you have a small description of each of them (according to their blog post).

OpenX for Drupal

The module was developed for Drupal 5.x and 6.x and supports OpenX 2.6 and later (you need to have OpenX installed on your server to take advantage from this module). This is a working protoptype and developers can help improve it. More details here.

Download the modules:
- Drupal 5.x
- Drupal 6.x

Installation
To install and configure the module:

1. Unzip the relevant Zip file (according to which version of drupal you are using) into your Drupal/modules folder.
2. Login to your Drupal admin console and go to Home > Administer > Site building
3. You should now see the OpenX module listed. Enable it
4. You need to setup your zones in Home > Administer > Site configuration > OpenX AdServing
5. If you have an account on the hosted version of OpenX, you only need to put the zone ID’s into the table (you can also give the zones meaningful names here).
6. If you want to serve ads from your existing OpenX installation, expand the “Don’t have a hosted account?” section and enter the delivery URL to your OpenX installation
7. You can then add the blocks to your layout in Home > Administer > Site building > Blocks

They have prepared also a FAQ for you in case you have more questions.
And, of course, you can always get support on their forum.

OpenX for Joomla!

The module (working prototype) was developed for Joomla! version 1.5.x and requires OpenX 2.4 and later (and also the hoted version of OpenX). As in Drupal case, you need to have OpenX installed before taking advantage of this module. More here.

Download the module for Joomla 1.5.x

Installation
To install and configure the module:

1. Go to Extensions – Install/Uninstall
2. Upload the Openx module Zip file
3. Go to Extensions – Module manager
4. Find OpenX and click name to open module
5. Enter the delivery URL where you have installed OpenX. If you have set your delivery URL to be different from that of the main installation then place that here. By default the OpenX hosted version is placed here. You need to have an account with OpenX to use this
6. Enter the zone ID which you wish to display in this module
7. Now choose the position in your Joomla! template where you want to display ads
8. Enable the module
9. Your ads should now appear!

To create multiple ads on one page, copy the module and repeat steps 4 – 8.
Read also the FAQ page  and into more support on their forum.

OpenX for WordPress
Because Wordpress is wildly used OpenX had to develop a plugin for this blog system (many times Wordpress is seen also as a content management system too).
Like in the above cases the Wordpress plugin is a working prototype and developer can contribute to make it better. The plugin supports OpenX 2.4 and later as well as the hosted version of OpenX.

Download the plugin for Wordpress 2.5.x

Installation
You need to have OpenX installed before installing this plugin.

To install and configure the plugin:

1. Drop the attached file in the /wp-content/plugins folder of your WordPress installation
2. Enable the plugin in the WordPress administration console.
3. Setup the OpenX server in the OpenX-WP setup page
4. You can now add OpenX banners within your posts using the macro “{openx:NN}” where NN is the OpenX zone ID that you want to display.
5. This plugin also provides a widget which can be added to the WordPress sidebar

More detailed instructions can be found in the attached README.txt file.
Their FAQ section can answer to more questions you might have. Not to mention the forum.

These prototypes were designed with simplicity in mind but the team expects, with the developers help, that these plugins to be developed into feature rich integration tools.

©2010 MyTestBox.com :: web software reviews, news, tips and tricks. All Rights Reserved.