Feasibility of using Concrete5
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I have used it for a website and plan to use it with some non-profits. Would love to switch our school district to it. However, all the schools and districts I see using it are not as extensive as what we have with out old home grown CMS. We have a huge district site with 86 department sites (includes schools). Some inherit the district template, many, like the schools have their own templates. Within the departments and schools staff and teachers have their own sites that inherit the school or department template. There are just under 2000 sites created and probably less than that, but over 1000, that are actively being used.
Right now teachers log in with it authenticating to their active directory accounts and I would like to continue that.
Is this asking too much of Concrete5? Are there any comparable sites out there this extensive? Any third party vendors capable of helping us meet these expectations?
Thanks, LauriBeth Hull, Internet Technology Specialist, lhull@everettsd.org, Everett Public Schoolshttp://www.everett.k12.wa.us
Right now teachers log in with it authenticating to their active directory accounts and I would like to continue that.
Is this asking too much of Concrete5? Are there any comparable sites out there this extensive? Any third party vendors capable of helping us meet these expectations?
Thanks, LauriBeth Hull, Internet Technology Specialist, lhull@everettsd.org, Everett Public Schoolshttp://www.everett.k12.wa.us
The big question you will face is do you want to run one uber site or
many small ones. There's pros and cons for both of course:
Big Uber site:
pro: All the assets are in one spot, changes can easily happen
centrally, everyone's in the same playground.
cons: They're not really separate websites, so even if you use the
domain mapper, you're going to run into cross links, missing
sitemap.xml files for the different domains, etc.
Many sites:
pro: Changes to one don't negatively impact another by accident,
flexibility. You're using the system as it was designed
cons: Sharing content or themes becomes a management challenge.
We've got a proposal out to build a client/server workflow engine that
would let you get the best of both worlds, but its a 6 figure proposal
and the client hasn't said yes yet, so I can't promise you it'll be
available any time soon.
The other thing is you'll have to hack/build lDAP support. You should
check out the initiative we have here for standardizing on that:
http://www.concrete5.org/about/blog/core-roadmap/authentication-fra...
There are many colleges, universities and schools that love using
concrete5. We recently built this one out ourselves:http://cune.edu
What you're doing would certainly be a project, but concrete5 would be
a great framework to use for it and we'd be happy to try to help.
best wishes
Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz