Building Websites For Nonprofits With Open Source Content Management Frameworks

Abhijeet presented last week at the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEC) 2005 San Diego Regional Conference on open source content management frameworks for building websites for nonprofit. He published his fabulous presentation online under a creative commons license:



Building Websites For Nonprofits With Open Source Content Management Frameworks



He really knows what he's presenting on, since much of his presentation is based on his hands-on experience with a massive project we just completed here at Urban Insight. We completed a migration of Planetizen from our own five-year old homegrown CMS to Drupal. It was a six-month process, but well worth it. We have a much stronger taxonomy, a modular design that makes it easy to add new features in the future, discussion forums and commenting, as well as user management.



In the process, Abhijeet evaluated a number of possible CMSes, including Midgard, OpenACS, Xoops and Zope, all of which he covers in his presentation.



What I've learned from our migration process, as well as our own work implementing CMSes for a wide range of clients is that the best way to select a CMS or CMS framework is to start by identifying your organization's requirements.



After all, if you don't know where you're going, any CMS will get you there.