Website building for volunteer organizations

Taipei, Taiwan - Sunday, July 9, 2011 - What is the best way for a volunteer organization to build a website? Is there a system that is easy enough for novices to use, but powerful enough to allow for expansion as your organization grows? And if you have an inspiring idea, or a cause that you are passionate about, how can you share it with the rest of the world?

Those were some of the questions addressed at Drupal Camp Taipei, on July 9, 2011. Drupal is a free website-building software, designed by a collaborative community of volunteers around the world.

One of the world’s top 30 contributors to Drupal, John Albin Wilkins, gave the keynote address to the gathering in Taiwan’s capital city. Wilkins started by talking about a common problem that confronts people who want to build a website: the daunting amount of stuff to learn. HTML is just for starters; and then there is CSS to make the website look pretty; followed by programming, like Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, RSS, Facebook OAuth, Weibo, Google+1 button - and on and on.

If you found that list overwhelming, you are in good company. So how can we make website building easy? Wilkins said, the main reason Drupal exists, is to relieve you of the need to learn all these technologies, and, to some extent, help build the website for you.

Most people know what kind of content they want on their website, but they need a web content management system (CMS) to sort out the technical issues, of design and features. Drupal implements website design with a templating system, and implements features with plug-ins, extensions and modules.

Drupal was launched in 2001, by then college student Dries Buytaert, who started on his own, before soliciting the help of his roommates, and then students at other universities when he made Drupal open source. The latest version, Drupal 7, was collaboratively built by over 1,000 people.

Of course, Drupal is not the only free CMS on the market. The other two main open-source choices are WordPress and Joomla. Together, the three power 10% of the web. So which one is for you? When selecting a CMS, the four main things to consider are (1) price, (2) licensing, (3) community and (4) extensibility. Extensibility means the capacity of your website to expand with you. Wilkins said, WordPress is a fantastic CMS for blogging, but there are a lot of things that it won’t do. So you need a website that can grow, as you learn more.

But since Drupal, WordPress and Joomla are open source, you can copy the code from one, and use it on another program. So while the three are rivals, they are also in cooperation. This mixture of competition and cooperation is called “coopertition”.

There can be problems with compatibility, when added features do not work well with each other. But in Drupal, when two modules are incompatible, the problem is classified as a “bug” that needs to be fixed by the collaborative community of Drupal volunteers.

Drupal is used by big commercial and small non-profit websites. Some notable success stories are Grammy.com - which has very heavy use once a year during the awards. Drupal is able to handle the traffic, and also produce a beautifully designed website. Another big website is PGA.com, which has a large number of integrated features.

A more grassroots example is Big Ideas@Berkeley, which is a website for Berkeley students to submit proposals to change the world, which are judged by a foundation that evaluates and funds them. The “Big Ideas” include drinking water and biofuel projects, and social justice and business startup programs. Another smaller website that also uses Drupal is a Big Ideas winner, Future Scientist.

Apart from being free, powerful and user-friendly, perhaps the main reason Drupal could be the choice for NGO websites, is because it is built by social activists. Wilkins said, the Drupal community enjoy writing code to help other people change the world. The geeky slogan “hook_world_alter()” (which means “change the world’ in computer code) is a popular t-shirt design at Drupal conferences.

Summing up, Wilkins urged everyone to “Be great at what you do and share it so others can be great at what they do.”