Technical+Considerations


 * Technical Considerations**



In designing and implementing my eLearning hub, I needed a rapid development and deployment platform that would accelerate my progress and not bog me down in low level coding issues. Since I was already targeting Drupal as the content management system (CMS) and web framework for the Noosphere University platform, I felt that this would also be a good choice for the hub. I could leverage resources across both projects as needed, learning all about Drupal myself, and take advantage of the enormous amount of pre-built modules, themes and installation profiles available, all completely free of cost.



I also discovered Drupal Gardens, a free hosting site for Drupal-as-a-service. Drupal Gardens has many built in productivity boosters and also allows members to offload sites to other hosting environments. Drupal Gardens also has a number of restrictions not found in standalone Drupal sites, so the prospect of eventually offloading the hub to a different hosting environment where I would have complete freedom within the Drupal environment was highly attractive. Also, for a low monthly fee, you can host on Drupal Gardens using your own URL, so this settled it for me. I would build the hub on Drupal Gardens, pay for hosting of my URL (elearninghub.org) so as to establish a more professional address and presence, and eventually offload the site to my own hosting solution to take full advantage of Drupal capabilities going forward.

Read more about Drupal Gardens.