Just within the last 2 weeks I launched a news portal called “School Matters”. We used an open source product called Joomla. Joomla is a content management system that is quite impressive from an ease of use perspective.
The School Matters site offers a photo gallery, document management system, forums for discussions, interactive calendars, , newsflashes, eNewsletters, and much more. One of the cool features is remote publishing, rss, and all the plugins that add new functionality to the core system.
There are several other CMS systems out there, but I haven’t found many that are as easy to use as Joomla. Drupal is another that I am looking into.
I’d like to create a complete educational portal using Drupal, Moodle, and ELGG. These 3 web apps can work together to provide a news portal, learning environment, and a social environment. Students and teachers could work in concert to build learning spaces with groups and shared resources.
It will be a busy summer.