Why Every Association Should Know About Aegir

February 14, 2010 | by Krystee Dryer | Posted in Web Development

You probably have heard a lot about the Drupal content management system (CMS) lately with the White House website launching on Drupal, it winning the Best Open Source PHP CMS two years in a row, and its easy-to-learn site administrator user experience. But, what usually goes hand-in-hand with articles about Drupal’s greatness is the mention of the steepness of the Drupal developer’s learning curve.

Drupal is not the easiest system to install and set-up. This is fine for single website developed with a good web development firm – you won’t need to worry about learning how to develop a new site. However, what if your association currently has or wants to create stand-alone websites for numerous chapters? Your choices are to (1) let them deal with this issue themselves, choose their own host, CMS, design, and more (the association would have no control over the sites), (2) maintain and train an IT department to create each site so you can have some control over the sites, or (3) contract with your web development firm to create each new site for each chapter. Those choices may not fall in line with your organizational goals or budget.

There is now a fourth choice, and it is pretty interesting and exciting:   Install the Aegir platform to administer your Drupal sites. So what is the Aegir platform? Here is the official definition of Aegir: The Aegir platform is a distributed instance management system, which allows an authorized site administrator to administer, maintain, and control multiple Drupal sites through an easy front-end interface.

In clearer terms, Aegir lets your (non-technical) site administrators easily create a new stand-alone site for an individual chapter on your server ready for content in about 5 minutes. The Aegir platform lets you, the association, maintain the control that you want of the new sites (create, disable, delete, reset main passwords, move, etc), but lets your individual chapter maintain the content (and any other aspects that you allow them).

The possibilities of the different configurations are basically endless, but here are a few options that might appeal to your association:

Access Control

Through permissions, you can control what your chapters are allowed to maintain and create. For example, you can let them edit exisiting page content, but not create new pages. You may not let them create pages, but want them to create and maintain their own events listed on a calendar. The permissions are completely configurable to your organization’s desired workflow.

Design

You may want all of your chapter sites to look the same or you may want to give them a choice of a few options. Aegir can be configured to allow any of these scenarios and automatically install them upon site creation. A few examples of how this can be used:

• Have 1 theme for the main site and have 4 different chapter themes that each chapter can choose from (but still maintain the association’s correct branding and message).
• A main every-day chapter theme is provided, but then you provide them with an updated tradeshow theme when it is time for the association’s annual tradeshow.
• Allow your chapters to add different individual elements to a standard provided theme (for example: chapter logo or message).
• Provide 1 theme and allow a chapter to change the color scheme to provide them with their own custom look.

Navigation/Structure/Content

You can have some basic content and navigation structure propagated at the creation of the website. In this scenario, the chapters will just need to add their individual content such as chapter events, staff members, and contact information to get started.

Functionality

Provide tools already pre-installed such as membership rate calculators, event calendars, mailing lists functions, members only areas, document management systems, e-commerce packages, or any other tool that would be helpful to your chapters.

Site Analytics

You can track each new chapter site with your site analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) by having your code already installed on each new site that allows you to track them individually all in your single account and allow the chapter to track themselves as well. With a well-defined analytics plan, you can see which chapter is receiving the most traffic, which chapter is sending the traffic to you, and what that traffic is doing on your sites.

An Aegir platform installed and configured for your association’s needs and workflow can really provide a direct benefit to you and your individual chapters, but most importantly allow the association to control the areas that should be controlled. It also takes the creation of the news sites out of the hands of developers and into the hands of site administrators which can save both time and money.