I have created some views to replicate these pages with more filtering options. View Bulk Operations does come with a sample view for content, but I found that this view didn’t contain the options I wanted. Each view comes with two pages: one to replace the default admin pages (admin/content/node, admin/content/comment, and admin/user/user) and one for a tabbed interface of all three views. It would be nice if these could be the same page but you can’t have more than one URL for a page. These are in use on The Webmaster Forums. Some of the terminology might need to be adjusted for your site, particularly the label for the taxonomy filter (forums are taxonomy terms). Views Bulk Operations is used to allow operations to be run on multiple items at once.

Warning: These views have a lot of complicated filters that may not be suitable for some users. You may want to restrict this to advanced users only (although I’m not sure there would be a situation where a user would have the administer nodes permission but wouldn’t be sophisticated enough to work with this interface!)

Below are screenshots of the three views (click to enlarge) with links to download the views.

I have been on maternity leave since October so I’m not entirely sure of the reasons for this decision. I know that some people went for training on the Open Text system in November and found it to be very cumbersome and difficult to use (something I thought was evident from the beginning, to be honest!). I think there were some other issues as well but I don’t know too much.

Needless to say, I am thrilled!  There is a tiny bit more information on the Kitchener Waterloo Drupal User’s Group, as well as in the UW Daily Bulletin.

I did do my best to sell the benefits of Drupal to the committee, and to explain why the OpenText product (formerly called RedDot) was not a good solution (phrasing it politely). However, I’m not sure that, given the chance, “we” would have chosen Drupal anyway. Why? Here’s a few of the biggest objections given by others in the group:

1. Sever models – the other two systems under consideration used a “push” model where static pages would be published to outlying web servers. This was considered to be preferable to a centralized model where pages are served by a database. Why? Mainly because many units within the university really want to run their own web servers. They also liked that the main system was “behind the firewall” and therefore more secure. This issue was focused on by some people to the exclusion of any other factors (usability? functionality? extensibility? who cares?). A few people actually said that since these two systems used the same publishing model then they were “really the same”.
2. “It’s not enterprise” - I’m not sure what this is actually supposed to mean but it was a big problem for some people (and I’ve heard this in other higher ed circles as well). Maybe if it had a sticker price of half a million dollars and  obscenely complicated server requirements, then it would be “enterprise”??
3. Security – there are still many people out there who believe that open source must be insecure because it’s developed by “some guy in his basement.”

There might have been other issues, had we ever gotten around to actually testing Drupal against the other two systems. Drupal isn’t exactly known for its usability, but from what I saw from the others Drupal isn’t any worse and might actually be better. To be honest, our presentation from Acquia didn’t do a lot to make the benefits of Drupal more clear.

Update 04/02/2011: As is turns out we did choose drupal.