Site@School CMS
June 1st, 2006 | by Tim Wilson |My district is evaluating options for a new system to maintain our Web pages. We had a demo of SchoolCenter a couple days ago and it didn’t look too bad. I found their templates to be pretty unattractive, but they’re probably better than most schools’ Web pages. While poking around I discovered an open source alternative called Site@School. I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure if it would scale up to an entire district, but you can’t beat the price. I found some good examples on their Websites using Site@School page.
Tags: Open source
12 Responses to “Site@School CMS”
By Miguel Guhlin on Jun 1, 2006 | Reply
Howdy! Have you seen http://cmsmatrix.org ? Definitely worth a visit…it will allow you to generate a rubric or list of features and then compare multiple CMSs against each other.
Great stuff…we use Mambo at http://itls.saisd.net/portals and you can also see Plone. Mambo is our preferred tool. You can take a class this summer (week long) if interested….
Miguel
By Nathaniel on Jun 2, 2006 | Reply
Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul Public Schools use Urban Planet for their website management. http://www.urbanplanet.com/ Local company that you might want to talk with. Easy to use for teachers to create their class pages and school pages.
By Richard on Jun 4, 2006 | Reply
I am going to propose Site@School for the elementary grades at my new school. My main goal is to provide easy class web pages, a way for parents to check in on class progress, and straightforward intranet content management. Hopefully, discussions and demo will take place in July and August. One of my favorite features of open-source software is the ability to try by installing! We are also doing that with Koha and Emilda library management software at my current school this month. Keep in touch and we’ll compare notes.
By Brian on Jun 5, 2006 | Reply
We use Schoolcenter for all grades in our district. We have been using it for over 3 years and they have come a long way. Their tech support is fantastic and they have been able to help many of our teachers publish sites that they would never have done if not for School Center.
By Craig Nansen on Jun 10, 2006 | Reply
We have also used School Center for four years now, and it is one of the best investments we have made. If they host the site, is qualifies for e-rate funding. I don’t have to worry about updates, fixes, etc. They take care of all of that.
We fought for years to get teachers to have a web presence, offering workshops in Claris HomePage, DreamWeaver, etc. Probably 5 of our 500+ teachers set up and maintained a web presence after the workshops. Now every teacher has their own classroom page and maintains it, posts grades online with secure passwords for parents, etc.
We are trying to take our School Center site to another level, design wise, and School Center is working with us to design our own custom templates. We are also working to get our pages designed with DreamWeaver and CSS to be reproduced in School Center.
They continue to update their product, recently adding (and improving) blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, etc.
By criação de sites on Jun 26, 2006 | Reply
very nice blog ,congratulations….
By Home Schooling on Aug 1, 2006 | Reply
thanks for sharing
By J Calvert on Aug 6, 2006 | Reply
I just started to build with Joomla this summer. It is a robust and well supported CMS worthy of a look.
By Alex on Aug 14, 2006 | Reply
This place hosts the Site@School , also another one at http://www.siteatschool.co.uk
By Alex on Aug 14, 2006 | Reply
free hosting: http://www.SiteAtSchool.com
By fak3r on Sep 1, 2006 | Reply
Thanks for the post, I just found it via Google. The school my daughter goes to was in need of a new site, I did a working mockup with Site@School one afternoon last Fall, they told me they had bought a CMS solution and it’d be implemented Jan 2006. Today they finally got around to bringing it up, and it’s built on School Center. I care less about who they go with than having someone that knows how to use it. Currently the site looks a little better than before, but the data they imported over still has bad links, email links that don’t work, etc…
Again, sites that I run were built for free and look very professional next to these, but I guess that’s what hacking around with open source will do for ya.
By Rich on Sep 3, 2006 | Reply
I’ll throw in my two cents’ worth regarding Site@School - our K-8 school has used it for about two years and I have been very pleased with it. It’s a snap to get up and running (for anyone familiar with general FTP’ing and setting up a MySQL database) and it has really taken our website to the “next level.” We have about 90% participation by our faculty, and as the webmaster (full-time teacher) it has allowed me to go from spending 90% of my webmaster time doing the mechanical stuff and 10% creating content, to 90% creating content and 10% doing the coding work. Of course that is likely true for most any CMS, but — as someone pointed out earlier — the price for Site@School can’t be beat and I think that it offers all of the essentials for a good school site. For a district, I would only imagine that with X number of schools you could do X setups of the same code. The support is by volunteers but is excellent and very fast, and there are several hundred schools (mostly in Europe) who are all up and running. I’ll add that the support is 100% in English.