iCitizenForum.com, a Drupal website about Citizenship. The following case study documents some of the factors that led to choosing Drupal, and outlines the technical approach for the project.
Background
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation operates the world's largest living history museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. The foundation preserves and interprets a 301-acre Historic Area; operates museums, outreach programs, and the John D. Rockefeller Library; and carries out important research and archaeology pertaining to the origins of America. In accordance with its mission, "That the Future May Learn from the Past", the foundation is concerned not only with recreating the 18th-century experience, but with facilitating education about the idea of America–both in its beginnings, and in its relevance for the future.
iCitizenForum.com, a website that promotes discussion around the topic of Citizenship, is a fitting extension of this core mission.
Discovery
By the time of our involvement with the project in late 2007, work had already started. Designs had been produced. A website had been custom-coded in ColdFusion. Community features had been implemented using a .NET-based social software solution. The concept had already gone through several major evolutions, and its stakeholders felt that the latest iteration still wasn't quite spot-on.
We began our work with a collaborative discovery process to reassess the primary goals for the website and identify the best steps forward. The central purpose of the project, as defined during this process, would be to engage users with a discussion around the idea of Citizenship. In line with this goal, we established the following requirements:
1. Use blogs, organized by themes and tags, as the primary means of engaging users.
2. Leverage video as a prominent means for delivering content, in blog posts and elsewhere in the website.
3. Offer forums as a platform for supplemental discussion.
4. Provide in-depth resource materials, including translations for some documents, with background information on the subject of Citizenship.
Choosing Drupal
There were snags early in the prototyping process. The community building software being used didn't support heterogeneous categorization. We wanted two taxonomies for the same content: one for five discussion topics that would serve as site-wide containers, and another for free tagging. Additionally, we saw issues on the horizon with creating page content that would be separate from the blog, structured under a hierarchical menu, but capable of being categorized just like a blog post. In the technical setting at that time, these features were simply unavailable–at least without extensive custom development.
The problems we were up against essentially boiled down to categorization–something Drupal excels at. Beyond categorization, Drupal's community features, configurable content-types, access control, flexible menus, and RSS publishing were attractive. Additionally, content management "at large" was a subject we often visited in our work with Colonial Williamsburg, and had just as often abandoned due to issues of cost, licensing, and interoperability within an already massive web architecture. As a fairly isolated piece within their broad spectrum of web deployments, iCitizenForum.com would be an ideal test-case for the Drupal framework.
Windows Hosting
Colonial Williamsburg runs IIS on Windows NT servers, uses ColdFusion for development, and serves up data with Microsoft SQL Server. It was an uncommon environment for Drupal. Time constraints and a pre-existing service agreement for a dedicated NT server made considering LAMP unrealistic, so we began exploring the viability of hosting Drupal on Windows in a production environment. We installed PHP 5, MySQL, and an IIS module (ISAPI Rewrite) to provide mod_rewrite-like URL rewriting for clean URLs.
