Hi Rory,

From my experience of making school websites, there are no "School" templates or modules/code etc. I have simply started with a blank theme such as Clean http://drupal.org/project/clean and then built the CSS/HTML from there.

As for modules, I presume you will want things like, an Events calendar, an Image Gallery or maybe even a small intranet for different users to log on and be able to access different types of content. All these are simply Drupal modules that need installing and configuring.

I'm not sure about focus groups however, maybe there are some set up that specialise in school websites? Never came across any before though.

If you want more details on the modules I'll be happy to list the essentials I use - and I'm sure most others will use.

Cheers. Garry.

Also take a look at http://opensourceschools.org.uk

You might also want to track progress of the Eduglu drupal installation profile

• http://drupal.org/project/eduglu
• http://community.eduglu.com
• From @eduglu / @kylemathews

Appreciate that http://drupaledu.org is US focussed, but there might be some initiatives of interest there too, I haven't really been through it.

Have fun :)

Hi Rory,

I am a school governor for my daughter's primary school and am looking into using drupal for their website as the current site is very inflexible and hard to manage.  I was looking at some of the drupal distro's and think with an element of customisation something like the drupal commons distro from acquia could be tailoured to a school website.  

I'll let you know my findings if the school give me the nod on this approach.

Regards,

JamieT

There are some free/open-source templates on drupal.org(http://drupal.org/project/themes).  I would recommend the marinelli theme, but there are plenty to choose from, just download a few and play about with what you want your site to look like. If you are looking to create your own theme (and you know a bit about html/css) think about creating a sub theme from Zen or something like that.

There are a few groups; http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-education

The installation profile DrupalEd seems to have been put on the back burner for a while unfortunately, :(.

Also I would consider using Drupal based CiviCRM within a school as it does enable you to manage donations/worker/volunteers which can be quite helpful to a school. I know when I was working with a school, they wanted to develop a more robust and community based solution for governers, both governer to governor communication and parent/teacher/pupil to governor communication.

I think a useful way you think about it is look at what features you require in your site; forums, user profiles, signups, e-commerce stores and build the site around that. I am in the process of creating a few idaes for install profiles (just updates to old ones really) but i will try to think on it for a while.