Drupal & Joomla: A cure for lousy library website design!

Fed up with frequent encounters with unnecessarily lousy websites, my friends Kristin and Marina and I started experimenting with ideas for providing good free web design help to smaller underfunded libraries. At the time we thought, hey, why not just provide free pre-designed library templates for download! The problems with this of course is that one would need to know some html and, because it doesn't solve the bigger issue of archiving content and integrating the catalog into the front end, it'd only be putting lipstick on a pig. But we were on the right track....

Drupal and Joomla, free open source content management systems, THAT'S what we were looking for! Unlike building a simple set of webpages from Dreamweaver or FrontPage, a content management system has a database structure behind it and allows you to create, store and organize all of your information. This data is then queried, uploaded into an html document and displayed as a webpage according to your template style. It allows you to set your design style and makes it extremely easy for others to go in and edit the content without needing to know any programming or html. Content management systems can run into the tens of thousands of dollars but Drupal and Joomla are free....

Drupal Examples:
There is a great overview, Building Public Library Websites with Drupal on the Library and Technology Association Blog. The Ann Arbor District Library is a perfect example of a Drupal based library website.

Joomla Examples:
For examples of Joomla based library websites check out the uber informational Joomla in Libraries site. Or, if you have a little more time, there's the Open Source Solutions for Public Libraries presentation by the Tyngsborough Public Library which includes a section on their use of Joomla.