Building a Community or Nonprofit Website in Drupal

One of the earliest and still most common uses of Drupal is to build websites for community organizations and nonprofits. The reasons are obvious: as open source software, there's no up-front or continuing cost, and the Drupal modules provide enormous functionality right out of the box (or out of the download to be more specific).

In addition, the wide array of social media/social web modules means that you can have a modern website up and running quickly. My rule of thumb is that it typically takes half a day to a day to put up a site like this. That means a site that has appropriate security settings so that a variety of people can update and maintain it and so that its long-term prospects for survival are good. One of the problems with webmaster-based websites is that when the webmaster moves on to another project, the website languishes.

This series is based on experiences, comments, and questions many of which have come from others for which many thanks.

I'm trying to keep the technology in the background. It's based on my book, Sams Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours which covers just about all of the technology here. In addition, there are updates about the modules mentioned on northcountryconsulting.com.

This is a work in progress, so comments and requests for other topics are welcome.