looking for ideas [modified]
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
I don't have any suggestions and believe me I spent a lot of time trying because I wanted to justify they subject line but I have drawn a blank. Joomla is web 2.0 I think :P
Need a C# Consultant? I'm available.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway -
[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
Hmm, Google Apps for your Domain springs to mind. It's certainly very simple to use and if you farm off the mx records side of things to Google and pay for the Pro version you get API access to manage the mailing lists etc. Note you'd only be paying for people who had a @yourdomain.com email address, not everyone on your mailing list. You'd also get Google Calendar for event management, Google Sites allows very easy putting together of pages within a site so perhaps the article side of things. On a side note you should take a look at ASP.NET MVC, I've quite literally got the base of an entire "dynamic" new website for IC-RPC[^] up and running in about 5 hours. Now the only major things left to do are styling the darn website and making it more Web 2.0ish :rolleyes: (the great thing is I start off with non-styled pages etc and add in jQuery plumbing etc afterwards, would also mean a functional if not pretty site should javascript be disabled). I know it'd be more work initially but the MVC framework is a joy to work with after web forms (I've come from a raw HTML background so to speak so like getting back to basics and controlling the output). On a different project I was working on last night I wrote a very basic blog engine. If you'd like to know a bit more then drop me an email at ed {at} pooredesign {dot} com because it's planned to have:
- Calendar of events
- "Blog" in the form of news items (members of the committee posting them)
- Articles section
- Upload of photos / media to Gallery
The forums is the only thing I haven't considered at the moment but basic stuff (non-threaded would be easier, actually I just had a think and don't think threaded stuff will be too difficult) wouldn't be too difficult to implement using ASP.NET MVC. I mean I got the basics of a blog into one controller so you simply drop that and the views into the project and voila!
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site
I spent a lot of time maintaining websites for several non-profit schools. People keep telling me there are solutions that are totally free and that don't need any maintenance. I have yet to see any one of such beasts. The ones I was told to look at either has a lot of features that don't work the way I wanted or is a PITA to configure (in other words, it could take less time for you to write it from scratch).
My .NET Business Application Framework My Home Page My Younger Son & His "PET"
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
hi Colin I am working in a very nice company producing hardware remote access to servers and any computer over IP. If you wish I can help you contact the right person to explain the benfits of using hardware remote access to your servers. all maintainance can be done remotly (including boot, system instalation (windows/linux),power up/down) you may even access from your day jobs places if you have a computer (with internet) there. I will be happy to connect you to our company. good luck K.O.
only simple code
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Colin Angus Mackay wrote:
that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site
I spent a lot of time maintaining websites for several non-profit schools. People keep telling me there are solutions that are totally free and that don't need any maintenance. I have yet to see any one of such beasts. The ones I was told to look at either has a lot of features that don't work the way I wanted or is a PITA to configure (in other words, it could take less time for you to write it from scratch).
My .NET Business Application Framework My Home Page My Younger Son & His "PET"
One of my co-workers recomended using Joomla (an open source CMS)[^] to develop websites when another co-worker asked for a recomendation of a book on HTML that his son could read to learn about creating websites :wtf: He believes that one did not need to know PHP or MySQL to create sites using the CMS - even though Joomla is written in PHP and uses MySQL to store site data. :rolleyes:
Steve
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hi Colin I am working in a very nice company producing hardware remote access to servers and any computer over IP. If you wish I can help you contact the right person to explain the benfits of using hardware remote access to your servers. all maintainance can be done remotly (including boot, system instalation (windows/linux),power up/down) you may even access from your day jobs places if you have a computer (with internet) there. I will be happy to connect you to our company. good luck K.O.
only simple code
K.O. wrote:
If you wish I can help you contact the right person to explain the benfits of using hardware remote access to your servers.
We already do that. We don't want to have to deal with server maintenance at all. We just want to be able to modify the content.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
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[ADDITIONAL: I wonder why this deserved a one-vote...] I'm looking for some ideas for updating my community site. I am Chairman of Scottish Developers. A user group in Scotland for software developers of all types. We put on our own events and promote the events of others that may be of interest to software developers. We are going to be updating our website soon as the current one is getting old and tired looking. What we are looking for is a nice FREE (isn't it always) Web 2.0 solution. We'd like one central place where everything happens, but we don't mind farming out other activities to other Web 2.0 websites, especially if they provide some form of data feed through a RESTful interface or RSS or some such so we can build a page using XSLT. The main thing for us is that we don't want to be spending time maintaining our own webservers and site. We are all volunteers so we can't baby sit it 24/7 as we are currently having to do. We have already started to move to EventBrite for out event management and the trial is going well. We would like to provide forums, a calendar of events (ours as well as 3rd party), a blog for the committee (one blog, multi-user), and a place for putting articles (often blog engines allow that too, so it may be wrapped in the blog engine). The main website will just be a landing page for jumping off into the Web 2.0 solutions. We'd also like some sort of service for publishing our newsletters via email. At the moment I put the newsletter together then BCC the members. So, any thoughts on any parts of this would be most welcome.
Recent blog posts: *SQL Server / Visual Studio install order *Installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista *Crazy Extension Methods Redux * Mixins My Blog
modified on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 2:53 AM
We've used CMSMS (cmsmadesimple.org) on a number of projects and its proved easy for our users to work with. It took a bit to learn the templating system, but it wasn't that hard. But it allows us to assign individual pages to specific community editors. When they log on, they see only their pages which they can then update and change. I've looked at Drupal and Joomla and these are good, but I've found cmsms the fastest to implement.
Tom Christensen www.actiondigital.com
