Check out:

http://www.chrisbarr.net/design/falvey...

and

http://www.chrisbarr.net/design/vufind...

I'm a grad student at UT Knoxville who is doing a bold and reckless practicum redesigning a rural public library website. Fortunately, it has nowhere to go but up,http://wythegrayson.lib.va.us, as you can see. I'm choosing concrete5 as a CMS despite having much more experience with Drupal. Even in Drupal, however, I've only done content editing for existing sites, wholesale implementation of canned templates, and very minor "tweaks." I can barely find my way around in SQL and know no PHP whatsoever. I'm going to learn by doing. I need collaborators desperately, and Villanova's is one of my favorite library websites (Notre Dame's is the other). I like clean designs as opposed to the 24-module, 50-links-in-a-tall-footer method. I'm not half bad in Photoshop CS5. I'd love to connect with you and any other librarians implementing Concrete5, particularly in small rural public libraries, and when you "bounce ideas off" me I'll try not to just respond with, "Huh?"

I have the opposite issues -- good at php, sql and javascript, terrible at graphic design (well, not terrible, just bad). Also doing the same method, learn by doing. Its not pretty so far but its going.

Anyway, been at it about 6 months now, so if you get stuck in a corner, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. Also, if you ever are setting up some part of the page and say to youself "I wish there was a control that did X" or "I wish there was a block that handled Y", let me know. Thats the exact stuff I'm looking to compile. I'll send my info in a PM shortly.

Good luck on the site.

Hi David,

After looking at your profile, it seems that you might be sitting at my old desk! I am sure you are becoming intimately familiar with the Villanova site and VuFind.

I have personally thought that it would be nice to create an installation distro of Concrete for libraries. It would include a default information architecture/pages, some special blocks for libraries, and basically be easy to get up and running. It would be kind of like the PLINKIT initiative, only 1000 times better. (Palinet supports PLINKIT, so I am sure they would support something similar with development contributions from a partner institution.)

I also think that Concrete is a nice alternative to pricey packages like LibGuides. There are a few things that I think would be nice, like a link management system or even some link resolver functionality. I could go on... but if you want to pick my noodle, just shoot me an email or give me a call.

Say hi to Mr. Lacy!

--chris

Mr Lacy wanted to know where I heard from you. I left him in the dark (can't give away all my secrets....) . He says "Hi" back.

Oddly enough, one of the first things I worked on here is a link management system -- our course guides switch to the C5 CMS this summer and I've put the system in place to handle the switch. Maybe its the first item I can add to the pile of C5 library packages :). The code is ready to go, we just have to wait for the semester to end....

Actually, my prompt to begin the search for fellow library compatriots was to start the process of doing exactly what you described above -- a preset C5 installation for libraries (a C5 "Library-in-a-Can", if you will), though I know I would never have the time to accomplish this on my own. Hence, hoping to gather others to start sharing tools and the like, with a long term goal of having enough backing to at least make a showing against Drupal et al. Likelyhood, small. Though a man can dream.

D

I am very interested on connecting with other libraries using Concrete5. I'm just in the development stage of our site so I do not wish to share the link quite yet but I would love to see what other libraries have done with it!