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 within a day or two. We think this is fantastic, but this is the starting point for newschoolyard rather than the end point. We have started with the Drupal Core, and augmented it with a handful of modules from among the thousands available that we believe are especially well-suited for independent schools. We are spending months, and considerable capital, on configuring these tools in a manner that anticipates the practices and needs of various user groups within schools. We are developing our own Drupal theme library built upon a foundation of standard Drupal themes. We have integrated these stand-alone elements into a single system that is elegant, intuitive, accessible, and scalable. So 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 and related organizations. 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. We will begin the graphic design phase for our first clients in April, and we will begin deploying our system in May, for school website launches in mid-June.
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 environmen
Newschoolyard manages a Nitro Dedicated Physical Virtual server 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.
Newschoolyard fees are linked to the US Government Consumer Price Index (CPI). Annual price increases will go into effect as of January 1, based on the published CPI.
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.
The system we have compiled will be available for download from our website completely free of charge. 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 charge.
An essential tenet of the Drupal community is the development of a system that is accessible to users of varied levels of technological facility. Certainly from an administrative perspective, our compilation of Drupal tools is extremely user-friendly and intuitive even for those less comfortable with the tools of technology. To configure and integrate the system within a website of your own design, however, requires a level of technological and design proficiency that is outside of the range of basic users. Many schools have the human resources on staff to undertake the tasks of building a new site around our system. For those schools who wish to allocate such resources toward building a new site, we will provide access to our services. Our staff will be available for consultation as needed, at a rate of $185/hr. When the site is ready to launch the monthly service term of $299/mo will commence.
Newschoolyard is designing a template library of Drupal themes for school websites, for release in Spring 2010. The library will be expanded regularly. Schools choosing a design from our theme library will pay a one-time build fee of $6,000. Schools with the budgetary flexibility to opt for a custom design will likely choose the higher start-up option of between $8,500 and $11,000, payable over two fiscal years. Should your school choose the former option, rest assured that Drupal themes provide considerable flexibility for modification such that you will not run the risk of having the look and feel of your school’s site replicated elsewhere.
At the beginning of 2007 Schoolyard and finalsite entered into an agreement that came to an amicable conclusion on schedule in January 2010. The catalyst for this agreement was an evolving landscape in the world of independent school website development. Schoolyard was the first company to enter the market--in 1995--and others soon followed. By 2006, three companies in particular had grown signficantly larger than Schoolyard. A company of nine employees, Schoolyard had intentionally remained small. With our competitors growing ever larger, in some cases to over 50 employees, Schoolyard faced significant challenges and questions. First and foremost, how could we continue developing a proprietary software platform that was comparable to those of our competitors with a small fraction of the human resources allocated to the task? The answer was that we couldn’t. We either had to grow exponentially and quickly, or we needed to find a partner within the industry to serve our sizable client base while we considered options for the future.
Our agreement with finalsite was the perfect solution. Schoolyard clients had the benefit of optionally converting to finalsite’s comprehensive and robust system of school web solutions that was in active development. Freed from the responsibility of spending endless resources on development of Schoolyard SitePages, we were able 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 Schoolyard has now returned to the marketplace under the name 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. The open source community has allowed newschoolyard to provide very big solutions while remaining the small company we have always wanted to be.
Actually, we don’t charge for the software. Any school may download the system for its own use free of charge. Our monthly fee 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. Your monthly payment goes toward the cost of hosting, one hour of support, integration, 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 and modular upgrades to determine which solutions best match the needs of independent schools. We then add that functionality to our system. We keep an eye on Drupal so you can tend to other matters. And finally, a percentage of your monthly subscription fee goes directly to the Drupal Foundation to help defray the cost of supporting and perpetuating the Drupal intiative.
The reach of the Drupal community is vast, as current Drupal sites include: The White House, Am- herst College, The BBC, AOL, GreenPeace, The United Nations, and The Grateful Dead, and literally thousands of others. There are a handful of excellent independent school websites currently built with Drupal that we did not create so we want to state very clearly that we take no credit for these examples. We provide them here to demonstrate that the Drupal platform is already serving the independent school community: Catlin Gable School (OR), Redwood Day School (CA), San Miguel School (RI).
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 Dru- pal’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.
Get in touch
Learn more about the newschoolyard open source solution for independent schools. Call newschoolyard at 401.849.6110 or signup for demo.
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- Labor Day starts with great new client for NSY. Formal announcement next week.
