I’m now ready to take the web site to the next level, allowing the community of Milton scholars to contribute events, publication notices and more to the site.  It’s my hope that the site will become as useful as the discussion list has been.

The current site is on a static (i.e. non-cgi enabled) web server.  This server is slated for some big changes and I know the web address for the site is going to change.  A few months back I purchased the johnmilton.org domain, and I plan to use this domain for the new site.

When I first started with hosted servers, I looked at several of the open source content management systems. I settled on Joomla! because both the front end and back end were intelligible not only to me but to the community that will use the site.  I also liked the theme templates that are available.

In the back of my mind, though, Drupal has always been lurking as the best solution.  D’Arcy loves it. NMC switched to it.  It seems infinitely configurable, but that makes it seem infinitely complex, to me and the community.  Unless I could wrap my brain around it all and architect the site well.

The most recent upgrade of Joomla! broke both of the installations I was using.  Users can no longer log in on the front end.  So now I’m really looking at Drupal.  Here are my questions:

• What’s the state of spam and spam protection for Drupal?  Is there a Spam Karma 2 equivalent to keep me safe with a minimum of effort?  I plan to create user roles carefully, but I’d love to have a good security system in place.
• What are the best plug-in modules for Drupal?  I’m already looking at the Events module, since I need to have that kind of content on my site.  But what are the best plug ins overall?  I’ve always appreciated blog entries listing WordPress plug ins – love to see a Drupal list too.
• Do you have any theme recommendations?  I want to keep things simple, but Drupal’s default themes are a little plain.
• Other than Drupal.org, what are some good web sites for Drupal admins to follow?
• What am I not asking that I should?

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