LHC Content Management System

LHC has chosen Drupal as it's content management system due to it's clean architecture, extensive modularity, active community, versatile security and access provisions, and overall flexibility. Drupal provides, or will provide, the basis for the following components:

• Public website - both static and dynamic pages
• Membership database - CiviCRM
• Image repository
• Archives repository
• Oral history repository
• Event calendar
• Forum
• Blogs
• Wikis
• Books - like this one
• Ecommerce - sell images, books, etc.
• Membership self-join/renew/profile
• Intranet - for internal communications
• Games - history quiz, before/after guess, etc.
• Podcasting
• Video streaming
• Flickr integration
• Institutional bookmarks
• RSS feeds
• OAI-PMH compliance

The objective is a website that will serve a variety of constituents, hopefully without too much compromise. The researcher needs faceted searching, controlled vocabularies, and rich metadata. The layperson wants easy browsing, entertaining content, and plenty of graphics. Employees and volunteers need a publishing platform for communications and interaction.

All constituents will benefit from a site that provides for interaction and engagement. Features like a lively forum, ability to comment on content, free-tagging, annotating images and content, user content contributions, RSS feeds, etc. help engage the community in the effort. All of these features are readily available with Drupal.

The Drupal system will be public-facing, but will have fine-grained permissions to limit access to those parts of the system on an 'as needed' basis. Access control can limit read and/or write permissions down to the page level. This allows LHC to extend it's information processes (eg. membership management, database interaction, knowledgebase creation, etc.) out to a volunteer community anywhere on the planet.

There is a growing base of Drupal experts who could provide support to LHC in the future if needed.