An Interview with Cheryl Burnett, Web Master, Homewood Public Library
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Transcript
(ACH - A. Carey Huddlestun
CB - Cheryl Burnett)
ACH: How and where
did you hear about the CMS, such as Drupal and Joomla?
CB: One of our
local libraries got a Drupal account and then I saw it on the Internet also and
heard about it at conferences.
ACH: Were they
library conferences or web design conferences?
CB: Library
conferences.
ACH: What were
your motivations to adopt Drupal for its current use?
CB: We wanted
something that was easily updatable; we wanted something where different staff
members could update their own content and that has taken the load off me; and we
wanted something that was easily interchangeable.
ACH: What was the
decision process for selecting Drupal, was that the only one you looked at?
CB: We pretty
much made up our mind that’s what we wanted.
We didn’t even look at Joomla.
ACH: When did you
go with Drupal?
CB: Probably about
a year and a half ago.
ACH: What were you
using before Drupal to do your websites?
CB: We were
using Dreamweaver.
ACH: And was most
of the responsibility on you (for web design), so any updates or content
changes fell to you?
CB: Yes.
ACH: How was the
learning curve with Drupal?
CB: Pretty
steep! I’m not going to lie.
ACH: Well, we’ve
played with Joomla and I can tell it’s powerful, but to get beyond a template
takes some doing.
CB: Right. Especially coming from a straight HTML
background, where you build web sites using HTML and then progressing to
Dreamweaver and then going to Drupal is a completely different animal.
ACH: Right. What are some of the benefits or
disadvantages of using Drupal over Dreamweaver of HTML?
CB: Disadvantages? One thing I hate are the updates. Whenever there is an update for the core or
any of the modules, they have to done separately, and they are a pain – they are
not automatic and they can break your web site.
I got to where I don’t do all updates.
I was doing them for security, but so many of them broke the site that I
said, “Well, I’m not going to do updates much unless it is absolutely required.”
ACH: So even the
security updates break the system?
CB: They have,
yes.
ACH: Wow. That’s curious.
CB: We have a
customized template that we purchased and it is built to work with a certain
version of modules and I am thinking anything beyond that breaks it (the
website). A lot of them do, but some of
them don’t.
ACH: What are some
of the modules you have?
CB: I have the
basic modules and then I have a dynamic display block module – let me look here
– I’ll tell you the ones I like or that are most helpful. I like the Administration Menu module, that
helps the administrator, it’s a great one for the administrator; we’re using Collapsiblock
that collapses menus; we are using Calendar and Date – I hate Date, it breaks
it – I don’t update Date anymore.
ACH: Now what’s
the difference between Calendar and Date?
CB: Calendar is
its own module. Date uses a mini-browser
to run through the different formats: day, month – whatever you want – they are two different
ways at using a calendar, but also Calendar uses Date. Let’s see we got, like I said, Dynamic Dsplay
Block; we use Webform and Webform Report which we love for our summer reading
registration.
ACH: And what are
some of the advantages you’ve found with Drupal over what you were doing
before?
CB: Probably
the thing we like the most is that each department can update their own content
now.
ACH: Rather than
having to go through one person to make any change.
CB: Right. There are certain things I update also but
I’m not responsible for the whole thing anymore.
ACH: That’s about
it and this is great. Now when you say
you purchased a template was that from a company because I’ve seen some on the
Web?
CB: It was.
ACH: So you didn’t
have a Drupal programmer come in and create one from scratch?
CB: No. There’s
no need in doing that. There’s great
templates out there. In fact, Drupal has
a lot of free templates available on its site, but we didn’t see anything we
wanted there, so I just searched the internet and we found this template. Have you seen the site?
ACH: I have – it
looks good.
CB: We got that
template from Theme Shark and purchased it for seventy dollars and that really
does a lot of layout and getting it formatted like we wanted. So after we got the template there were some
changes we wanted made – we made it just like we wanted it.
ACH: OK. So changes you went in and made.
CB: Yes. Because the front page (of the template) has
a blog in the center of it and we didn’t want that – it got real long and your
homepage shouldn’t be that long. Ours is
a little long as it is but it is hard to tell everyone, “Not everything can go
on the front.” Everybody thinks, “Put
this on the front,” and no, everything can’t go on the homepage.
ACH: Right. Do you all do any blogs?
CB: We do. Actually, the children’s, the teen’s, and the
adult department – they have their own separate page with their own separate
blogs – their pages are blogs. If you go
and click the children’s button, that’s a blog, it just continually updates and
rolls up – rolls back. Actually, if you
look on the front page at the bottom left hand corner there is a button that
says library blogs and that’s a culmination of the three departments who have
blogs.
ACH: OK. Do you know what they use for those blogs –
what software?
CB: It Drupal,
it’s part of Drupal one of the modules is a Blog module - they are built into
all the Drupal templates. And we have
book review blogs and all the social media stuff.
ACH: Great. Well, that’s it for my end.
Reflections
It is interesting that the Homewood Public Library went from
using html, to Dreamweaver, Drupal (http://drupal.org/)
to create and maintain their web site.
This is a tribute to the power and rich features of Content Management
Systems (CMS) such as Drupal. As others
have reported (Lo, 2012), one of the most useful features of CMS is the ability
for each library department to take responsibility for their department’s web
page content. In Homewood Public Library’s
case, Drupal Blog allows the Children, Youth, and Adult departments to maintain
the content of their web pages thus relieving the web master from being responsible
for every content change. This expedites
content changes, allows department librarians to control their own content, and
frees the web master to be more productive.
While Drupal is feature rich, it requires effort and cost to
learn and maintain - even for librarians with html and WYSIWYG (Dreamweaver)
experience such a Burnett. As noted in
the transcript, when asked if the learning curve for Drupal was steep, Burnett
was quick to respond, “Pretty steep! I’m
not going to lie” (Burnett, 2012). It was
surprising to hear that the updates are problematic and “break the system”
(Burnett, 2012). I wonder if this is
common to other CMS or just Drupal? Although
the cost was minimal, $70, they did choose to purchase a third-party template
because none of the free Drupal templates met their needs. However, they did not see the need for paying
for third-part web design, beyond purchasing the template, so cost were nominal
and much less than paying for a custom designed web site. In addition, Burnett (2012) finds several
Drupal modules functional and valuable.
In summary, for the Homewood Public Library and web master
Burnett, Drupal provides a feature-rich, low cost web site which meets their needs. However, Drupal has a steep learning curve and
updates often break the system. Even so Drupal,
and its many modules, is able to produce a useful, feature rich web site for
extremely low cost. Finally, one of the
most valuable features of a CMS is it allows each department to create and post
their own department’s web page content.
References
Burnett, Cheyrl. (2012, May 23). Telephone interview. (Web Master, Homewood Public Library, http://homewoodpubliclibrary.org/)
Lo, Jimmy. (2012, May 21).
Email interview. (Web Master, Dekalb Public Library, http://www.dekalb.public.lib.ga.us/)
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