Use this page to provide feedback on your first impressions of the site -- what made sense? What didn't? How can things be more intuitive?

Report and bugs/broken links/etc on this page.

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First Impressions:

Start here.

Nice feature set and well thought out. I have not had time to play enough, but one thing I've encountered in my 4.7 middle school site is the need for a granular publishing flow process. In other words, have a teacher be able to moderate content of their student submissions. Privacy and teacher reticence to allow student overall control of the publishing cycle is a hurdle in terms of roll-out. I've been able to to create a process using flexinode, views and actions so that a teachers class is able to create work, have the submission of student work send an email to a teacher, who then is able to publish the work, or send it back for revisions. The editing process, and the ability to give teachers the ability to moderate content, is a feature I've found to be very popular.

Reggie Ryan
Springman Middle School
sp.glenview34.org

I'm not sure if this is where I should add my comments,but here I am. I just joined as I was reading Bud's blog and just from what I see it could be a cool place for my grad students to post and share reflections about our upcoming digital storytelling course.

Keep you posted.

Bonnie Kaplan

Thanks for the open invite. I am currently reviewing a few of these type CMS's, most specifically SAKAI, and I would like to see what I am capable of creating here.

Patrick Higgins

Sparta School District

Decisions about what CMS to use are oddly slow, and sudden. I need to make a decision about using something like DrupalEd or a Joomla site for the National Writing Project's Tech Matters Institute. I need to decide in the next couple of weeks.

What would I need to do to set up a site similar to this on Dreamhost or similar service... or do you suggest something else/

Paul Allison

--Response to Paul from Bill--

Hello, Paul -- a version of this site will be released out to the community in fairly short notice -- I'm also thinking through the details on a site that would have these same community features with location-enabled events, so users could post events along with geographic data (ie, a google map) so people can find their way there :) I don't know if this would be relevant to the site you're thinking of, but feel free to get in touch --

Bill --

Mostly amazing... but I found that I couldn't easily figure out how to add bookmarks or create my own work... and then when I found what I thought was the way, the bookmark didn't show up.

These look more like alpha release issues... overall, it looks amazing.

Also, did you take out the "artifact" feature? We were looking forward to using that to create the digital portfolios... or is that something that we can just add ourselves... all in all, I'd include that as a "standard" feature of DrupalEd, just because it is such a huge selling point to what it can do.

---Response from Bill---

I just added in the ability to create artifacts -- you can now add portfolio artifacts that reference your work within the site -- for now, the functionality exists, but the theming will need some tweaking to look pretty. This isn't difficult to do, however.

To create a bookmark, navigate to http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org/node/add/bookmark --

I removed the block to "add public content" in an effort to simplify the UI -- I think I'll add that back in, however, as it seems to create more questions than intended.

-- More stuff from Chris --

Here are a few more questions:
1) Can you set an entry to draft or does work have to be finished?
2) An issue w/ portfolios and groups... Might make sense to explain this in a FAQ, but as I see it, you're not going to want to keep kids in their class groups all four years, as that would get insane. So... some sub questions:
    a) What happens to student work in a group that either a) gets deleted or b) the student isn't in anymore.
    b) as student create portfolio pieces, they probably want to use some keywording or some other kind of group that is subject specific, but not class specific.
3) A question -- are all these users currently being created both teacher and student? I assume you're using roles to differentiate, but how does it look for students v. teachers?
4) To that end, what might be helpful for teachers (and admins) is to create a beta site that has some classes and students plugged in so that, as folks like Bud show this to a principal, they can see how it might look for their school. Even at SLA, I know we sometimes see where this might be really powerful, but we're having a hard time still structuring it well.