story

What’s new?

We believe now is the time for a seismic shift in the business of building web sites for independent schools. This shift is rooted in the open source community. Newschoolyard presents a revolutionary approach to the business of independent school websites from the company that started this business in the first place 15 years ago. Schoolyard unveiled our first school website at the 1996 NAIS conference in Washington, and worked with over 130 schools and school-related organizations between 1995 and 2007.

Our new approach: open source Drupal

“Old” Schoolyard invested a fortune in the development of SitePages, our former content management system (CMS). Today, through a variety of open source platforms, anyone can download a more robust CMS free of charge in a matter of minutes. Newschoolyard has joined the Drupal community to compile a school-specific CMS with an impressive array of integrated modules for release in new school sites this spring. Rather than hire dozens of programmers to build a new proprietary system, we have joined tens of thousands of developers worldwide who are actively contributing to Drupal. The reach of the Drupal community is vast, as current Drupal sites include: The White House, Amherst College, The BBC, AOL, GreenPeace, The United Nations, The Grateful Dead, and hundreds of thousands of others.

Informed by a depth and breadth of independent school experience spanning three decades, newschoolyard has scoured the enormous repository of Drupal tools to identify those that best serve our schools. We have then added a solution or two of our own, and finally we have integrated these tools into a seamless stand-alone system. Our revenue model is based on optional monthly service fees.

Finally, as members of the Drupal community ourselves, any unique work we do at newschoolyard is given back to the community, thereby contributing to the continuum of Drupal’s evolution.