I am also a library student and we recently chose between
Drupal and Plone
(we chose Plone) for a new website I am helping to develop
in the ICS
department here at Univ. of Hawaii. My recommendations
based on this
experience:
- Don't just pick a CMS based on the matrices you read on
the web (though
these can be very helpful in narrowing your decision), but
install at least
two and work with them for two weeks. We initially avoided
Plone ("too
steep a learning curve") and were pro-Drupal
("super easy to work with")
until we installed them both and realized that Plone simply
had more of what
we wanted.
- Plone 3 is far superior to Plone 2 (we initially started
with 2.5.3 and
90% of the things I thought "boy, I wish it could be
like this..." were
solved - hooray! - in Plone 3) in terms of ease of use and
capabilities. If
you thought about it in the past, you should definitely
reinvest some time
to check it out now.
- As a library student and an avid web-tech person, I would
say: always take
the opportunity to learn something new! But I also know
from experience
that working on a "real" project is usually better
than just doing something
for the sake of it. I wonder about that CMS class - how in
depth will it be
going, how many CMSs will it cover, is it basically just
material you could
learn from spending a couple days reading on the web? The
real benefit will
be in how much hands on experience you get out of it, in my
opinion.
Hope this helps, thanks,
Caitlin Nelson
UH LIS student
http://www.caitlinnelson
.com
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