Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

I'm here in Boston at Drupalcon 2008.  So far it has been a great session, getting to talk to other Drupal developers from around the world. The first day's sessions are over and I'm now looking toward an evening talking about Newspapers and NonProfits on Drupal. I'll be putting up some highlights later tonight.

We're in the process of updating our web servers.  By January we wil be in a position to offer higher-performance hosting of Drupal sites, as well as VPS hosting if that's what you need. More details later.

A selection of beginner videos on using Drupal. Enjoy. Sorry that the images are so small, but that's the way they are.

New Teacher NetworkOne of our latest web sites is the New Teacher Network site. New Teacher Network is a community web site for people who have recently started teaching. It offers organic groups that can be created by members of the site, and also includes a Moodle-based site for teachers to take classes.

The UK edition of ZDNET recently published an article on how businesses are not taking advantage of the power of CMS systems for their own web publishing needs. We couldn't agree more.

Mainstream content management systems are only now starting to provide
similar flexibility for publishers. Open source products such as Drupal and Joomla now
offer a viable way for smaller businesses to get on line effectively.
Like the blogging platforms, they introduce the opportunity to create
multiple sites, cost effectively, by re-using functionality, content
and platforms. But how many publishers are actually taking advantage of
this? Often, even where publishers have multiple sites, many are still
designed and built in isolation from their stablemates as businesses
fail to understand the benefits of one platform.

If you'd like to harness some of that power, talk to us.

April 25, 2007

The Cedar Cultural Center web site (designed and hosted by Cruiskeen Consulting LLC) has won the first Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Dot.Org award. The Cedar's site won the Community Convergence award as the best web site in Minnesota for community engagement.

Steve Hanson of Cruiskeen Consulting LLC accepted the award on behalf of The Cedar at the annual Tech Tools 2.0 Conference in Minneapolis.

Features of the web site that were cited as parts of the reason for winning the award were:

MNCN Dot.Org Award

• Streaming audio and video on the site, allowing patrons to see and hear performers coming to The Cedar.
• Innovative use of RSS both for aggregating incoming news and for the output of numerous RSS feeds for subscription.
• Use of user comments and feedback as community engagement items
• Simple on-line subscription to The Cedar's email newsletter

Cruiskeen Consulting LLC is proud to be part of the Cedar web team and congratulates The Cedar Cultural Center on winning the award.

Cruiskeen Consulting LLC is now a CivicSpace Associate. We can provide your small business or nonprofit with consulting on CivicSpace and Drupal.  We can provide hosting at the CivicSpace On Demand system (hosted by CivicSpace) or on our own hosting system, depending on your needs.

Our thanks go to the folks at CivicSpace on Demand for providing a low-cost and powerful system for managing web sites and member information. We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship 

Starting in early 2007, we will be offering some online training in Drupal and CivicSpace Content Management Systems. This short video is an example of the video training that will be available as part of the course.

Cedar Cultural Center Web Site: Cedar Cultural Center Web SiteCruiskeen Consulting re-launched the Cedar Cultural Center web site in August, 2006. The complete re-design of the site includes audio and video content, photo galleries, advanced calendaring features, email newsletters, and more. The long-term goal for this site is to incorporate CiviCRM, CiviMember, and CiviContribute to allow The Cedar to track donations, members, ticket sales, and other essential information, while integrating all of this with their web site.

Uppity Wisconsin is a place for discourse on politics in Wisconsin. It is developed in Drupal, and uses many of the Drupal features

• Calendar
• Userpoints
• Forums
• Incoming and Outgoing RSS feeds