Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Education & Educational Research, Technology, Content Management System, Drupal, User Generated Content

Abstract:

In today’s information world, everyone wants to share information to everyone: travel stories, advice to improve photographing skills, videos and screencasts, course material with additional resources and so on. A decade ago, creating this kind of sites was the privileges of the more technology aware persons. It required knowledge of server management, networking tools and coding. In the last few years, sites providing this kind of services were launched. Ease of use and no required maintenance made it possible for everyone to spread their stories. For instance blogger.com and wordpress.com were very popular sites to host a blog and gained immense popularity. Due to this popularity, other types of content were incorporated and the services were named Content Management Systems (CMS). In the particular context of education, a typical CMS is blackboard. Although very versatile, it might not contain that particular feature you are looking for. As this is the product of one company, a request for a specific feature may be overlooked if it is too specific. And creating the feature yourself might not be possible for copyright and commercial reasons. As creating a whole new site from scratch is not an option, free and open-source CMS such as drupal became more and more popular because it can count on a large user-based community who is willing to contribute on a voluntary basis. This paper describes shortly the history of site building and CMS. The recently make-over of a site with frequently asked questions in drupal is described as an use-case. Every step of the process is covered along with the arguments why a particular solution was chosen. Furthermore this paper wants to inspire and encourage other people to create their own sites with their CMS of choice.