Elizabeth Schaub wrote in her president's column that the chapter's first Web site launched in 1999, and I remember all the fretting and obsessing leading up to its release. It's 2006, and I'm experiencing a weird sense of déjà vue. The learning curve was steep, but the rewards are many. We now have a Web publishing platform that I'm hopeful will serve the chapter well into the future. The site is powered by the Drupal content management system, which allows an unprecedented level of control over the site's content. With Drupal's impressive list of add-on modules, I would be hard pressed to imagine functionality needed by the chapter that the system couldn't accommodate. Above and beyond, the chapter community is the force that brings the site alive and keeps it a dynamic and vital tool, which is in keeping with the underpinning philosophy of community that drives Drupal development: after all, Drupal's tagline is "community plumbing." And guess what? The software is also free.

The Medium

I especially want to highlight the dramatic shift in how we produce and display The Medium. No longer does The Medium appear as a huge chunk of text to wade through. Now each issue is presented with a table of contents, which allows you to easily pick and choose articles. Once you've accessed an article, you can quickly return to the issue's table of contents by following the breadcrumbs at the top of the content area. Printer-friendly links are provided at the bottom of each issue's table of contents and also at the bottom of each article.

In terms of the way we produce and edit each issue, chapter members who are contributing content will have special privileges that will allow them to post their work directly via the Web site and tag that content for later editorial review and publishing.

Finally, because of Drupal's modularity, each article can be repurposed and presented in other areas of the site. An example is the collection profiles, which appears on the main menu. These articles are brought together automatically via tagging from various issues of The Medium. Still another example is content that is highlighted in the "recent articles" section appearing in the righthand column on each page of the site.

Other Highlights

• Option to make the member directory public or available only to members
• Members' ability to update their own directory entry
• Members' ability to contribute comments and other content
• Members' ability to attach documents to content
• Automatic date stamping of content
• Ability to promote content to the front page
• RSS feeds: any page that features the orange rss icon is available as a RSS feed. Simply click on the icon to subscribe.
• RSS feeds on main menu collects all feeds in one place
• Main menu better organized (Administrative, Annual meeting, Lois Swan Jones Award, Membership, and The Medium all have sub items)
• Semantically correct markup and CSS-driven layout
• Easy-to-remember URLs (e.g. www.arlis-txmx.org/directory, www.arlis-txmx.org/themedium)

New Web Host

The chapter also has a new Web host for our site, AN HOSTING, which represents a signficant savings and increase in features over our old host. We now pay $95.40 per year instead of $167.40. Our domain name was activated on the new host on May 5, 2006.

Thanks

Thanks to Elizabeth Schaub for all the handholding, encouragement, and patience. I also owe a debt to John Robinson, Webmaster at the Amon Carter Museum, and Timothy Gambell, Graphic Designer and Production Manager at the Amon Carter Museum, for their good humor in answering my many calls for advice and help.