An important distinction needs to be drawn between a standard installation of Drupal Core (and modules) and an install of newschoolyard's Drupal system. In the case of the former, Drupal Core, selected modules, and a design theme are freely downloadable from Drupal.org. Assuming site content is ready to go, a new Drupal site can be up and running quickly. We think this is fantastic, but this is the starting point for newschoolyard rather than the end point. We started with the Drupal Core, and augmented it with a number of modules from among the thousands available that we believe are especially well-suited for independent schools. We spent the past year building a system with these tools that reflects the practices, and accommodates the needs, of various user groups within schools. This system is elegant, intuitive, accessible, and scalable. Whereas the original Drupal download is free to us, we are making a substantial and ongoing investment into tailoring from this foundation a unique and robust system for schools. This is a work in progress, indeed it will always be a work in progress. As members of the Drupal community, including newschoolyard, contribute to Drupal, we will be assessing and implementing these contributions for the benefit of our clients.
FAQs
You may not host a site designed and managed by newschoolyard on your own server. You may however download the Drupal core and Drupal modules and design, install, host, and maintain the site on your own server free of charge. If at any time in the future you wish to subscribe to newschoolyard’s service, we will provide a quote for migrating your site to our hosting environment.
Newschoolyard manages shared Nitro Dedicated Physical Virtual servers with MediaTemple, running on the Linux platform. This is the same server configuration and provider chosen by Adobe, Inc., Qantas, Diesel, and RipCurl, among others. The standard server space provided with our monthly service contract is 4GB. For schools requiring more server space, an optional 20GB allocation is available for an additional cost of $40/month.
Newschoolyard's optional service fees will increase annually at a rate of 5%, with increases scheduled on the anniversary date of the first month of service.
With newschoolyard your school is not bound by any service contract. We are committed to providing an excellent set of solutions to you at a reasonable price. We believe you will remain a newschoolyard client due to expections having been exceeded.
For schools who complete a registration process, the system we have compiled will be available for download from our website free of charge in November 2010. Our fee structure is based on the reasonable assumption that most schools will want our help to design and build the site initially and will also want our help in managing the system going forward. Our services are comprehensive and very reasonably priced, and given the cost and availability of human resources within schools we are confident that most schools who choose to download our system will also request our help in managing the system for them. Alternatively, with the proper allocation of human resources, a school may download the system, and design and build a site around it, for a fully functional Drupal site at no monetary cost. If there is a catch, it would be that there is significant human resource cost with the DIY approach.
At the beginning of 2007 Schoolyard and finalsite entered into an agreement that came to an amicable conclusion on schedule in January 2010. Our agreement with finalsite gave us three years to take stock of where the market had been and where it was headed. In our view, the market was headed toward open source solutions, and in February 2010 at NAIS AC10, Schoolyard returned to the marketplace as newschoolyard, “defining the business of independent school websites...again.” With the benefit of tens of thousands of Drupal developers worldwide, newschoolyard is able to provide a suite of solutions tailored specifically to the needs of independent schools at a fraction of the cost of available alternatives.
Actually, we don’t charge for the software. Starting in November 2010, schools will be able to register on our site for a free distribution our system. An optional monthly fee of $399 covers an array of valuable services that provide considerable savings to schools in terms of human resources. The cost to run newschoolyard is exponentially less than the cost to run a company supporting a proprietary code base, as we are not subject to the substantial salary and benefits and other overhead costs of an army of developers. The optional monthly payment goes toward the cost of hosting, one hour of support, security patch installs, and regular Drupal core and module upgrades. As developers world-wide are contributing to the Drupal community around the clock every day, we follow new developments, modular upgrades and security patch notifications to insure that our technology is always current. We then add that functionality to our system. We keep an eye on Drupal so you can tend to other matters.
The reach of the Drupal community is vast, as current Drupal sites include: The White House, Amherst College, MIT, The BBC, AOL, GreenPeace, The United Nations, The Grateful Dead, and over half a million others. Independent Schools running Drupal sites include our inaugural client sites Redwood Day School (CA), Hawaii Preparatory Academy (HI), and Nantucket New School (MA). An excellent example of an independent school Drupal site built in-house is that of Catlin Gabel School (OR).
From the Drupal.org website, Drupal is described as follows: “Drupal (pronounced drew-pull) is a free and open source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is used as a back-end system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites, including whitehouse.gov.
The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features common to most CMSs. These include the ability to register and maintain individual user accounts within a flex- ible and rich permission / privilege system, create and manage menus, RSS-feeds, customize page layout, perform logging, and administer the system. As installed, Drupal provides options to create a classic brochureware website, a single- or multi-user blog, an Internet forum, or a community web- site providing for user-generated content.
Drupal was also designed to allow new features and custom behavior to be added to extend Drupal’s core capabilities. This is done via installation of plug-in modules (known as contrib modules) created and contributed to the project by open source community members.
Although Drupal offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers, no programming skills are required for basic website administration.
Open source software is developed communally and is generally available for distribution free of charge. The best open source solutions are in a constant state of monitored development, wherein the expertise and passion of developers worldwide contribute to the steady improvement of a particular software product. The open source community has been active since the 1980s and has provided countless landmark solutions that are widely embraced by the general public, from the Linux operating system and MySQL database, to the PHP scripting language and content systems for the web including Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla. Even if these software titles are not familiar to you, you can be certain that you are on the beneficial receiving end of open source software solutions every day.
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Get in touch
Learn more about the schoolyard open source solution for independent schools. Call schoolyard at 401.272.0079 or signup for demo.
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