Vermont Community Site Planning
In the following Google Doc, I outline the functional requirements for our Two Towns Online community website. We currently have a mish-mash website presence, with several login areas that make us practically unusable. We have a commited organizational board with four members and we now have non-profit status. Anyway. We chose this route because we felt we needed a great wiki (MediaWiki), a great E-List (Yahoo Groups!) and a great bulletin board system (punBB), but now we're way too spread out with the multiple logins and MediaWiki isn't too exciting as a community homepage platform. Drupal has so many compelling community features that I will strongly encourage our group to shift to Drupal, which I selected after much research. But the way forward remains murky. My discovery of Bryght has been very encouraging yet I see the basic package doesn't have a wiki, and I don't like the idea of not being able to add whatever modules we want. But the support that Bryght offers seems absolutely key to our move forward, so the higher level plans are in view. Feeback appreciated.
I will refrain from sharing our website link because I don't want my board members to get too excited about any traffic jumps. As well, I gave up leadership for this version of the homepage and as far as I'm concerned the organization has become very confusing. Anyway, I'm in charge of Version 3, so this will change.
Comments
Re:Vermont Community Site Planning
If you feel Bryght as a better option compared to Drupal,that is if the advantage in the former out numbers the latter then you can proceed with the first.
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ragavendra
vermont drug rehab
Community Profile
Thanks for sharing. Many people are drawn to Drupal specifically because it is all integrated together: it's definitely a strong point.
Bryght Basic is meant to be....basic :P You *can* configure it to do lots of things (I've been pointing to Kelly's cool site about Tokyo and Yokohama recently). We'll be locking down the Bryght Basic preview release and starting to work on a community install profile -- see the placeholder page for a few details.
That being said....you seem like you want a high level of functionality and more complete control over modules. That means a Bryght Hosting VPS, or virtual private server. You do need more technical knowledge, so this may not be appropriate for your case.
Now, on to feedback on the document.
Wiki: Drupal 5 has a new permission tied to content types which you can create called "edit X", where X is the name of the content type. So, you can create a new page type called "wiki" and give all members this ability to edit any page. Turning on revisions means that you've got basic wiki functionality. Stress on the basic with what we currently provide, but it is included. See the Wiki installation profile for an idea of some other components.
Event calendaring: we've got a basic recipe for Events listings with CCK and Views. Newer versions of the Date module allow for subscription to iCal feeds (e.g. Google Calendar) which will remain updated. More recipes once this is pushed live, and the community profile will have some nice event listings out of the box.
File uploads: upload module and optional a dedicated "File" content type plus Views for custom file listings
Picture galleries: the image module does this. Flickr integration in the new community profile
Local website bookmarks: you can easily build a links directory by making a Weblink content type using the Link field. Synchronizing with social bookmarking sites is a feature near to my heart...
Also, you can use the aggregator module to subscribe to any delicious account or delicious tag feed and integrate that way.
Maps: hmmm...not sure if that will make it into the Community profile. There are Gmap and Ymap modules available, plus the Location module.
Forums: yep, we got 'em, and I'd like to nicely configure them. Forum Access is a module, and that may make sense for the Community profile. Truth be told, this might split into a simpler low-end community, and a higher end one with more bells and whistles, and the high end one would likely have the private content options. The Subscriptions module emails out updates, which *might* cut it...but it does not post via email.
Groups: the Organic Groups module is quite extensive. See http://groups.drupal.org for an example. And we're getting to quite the list of functions now!
That was fun! Can't promise I have the time for all posts of this length, though :P
Once we get a bit clearer picture of the direction of the community profile, we'll likely start posting some polls and asking for some feedback on what people really really want. We'll go through a Preview Release period again, so people will be able to kick tires on the community and we'll see how it evolves.
Wiki "compare" feature
You said "basic wiki functionality"... Does this functionality include revision "compares", like MediaWiki, Basecamp Writeboards, Google Docs, and many others do? If not, then that's not basic enough and will not qualify as a wiki to my group of complete novices who like wiki and are doing it. The whole point is to see exactly what someone else changed and how they changed it -- with "compares". I really need an answer to this point.
For Calendaring, I've seen an 30-day calendar view on many Drupal sites, with colored lines appearing in the day boxes. I don't know if this is included, but our community needs one central community events calendars that is visual as a calendar, so visitors can go to the day and compare what's happening.
For file uploads, in addition to being able to associate individual files with specific documents, we need a file archive repository area.
I would very much like to see where someone has integrated their del.icio.us bookmarks into Drupal.
More info
The wiki installation profile which I linked to in the previous post includes a "diff" module (which means compare in techie language). So, yes, it is possible to put together wiki functionality in Drupal. Not something we'll integrate in the
Calendaring works as you describe.
For file uploads, you can build a View which lists all nodes that have files attached.
On your other comment re: group e-list support. As I said, there are currently no APIs for Yahoo Groups. I understand that email integration is something of interest to many groups. Organic Groups, which I mentioned, sends out email notifications by default for all new posts, and the admins can also "force" email updates. This is still closer to "announce" style, but it does prompt people to come back and respond in comments on the site.
The built in aggregator works with any kind of RSS feeds.
Okay, that's good news with
Okay, that's good news with the wiki 'diff' feature. I'll hunt down some examples.
Elists like Yahoo Groups and forums seem to function is many similar ways today, so maybe we can convert entirely to only Organic Groups. This would have the added benefit of allowing people to get onto only "lists" they care about.
I post below my message from the other thread to consolidate this discussion. Thanks.
FROM OTHER THREAD
For my local area community online group, the Yahoo Groups! discussion list was the one feature that's held us together over 10 years, as people really like the Yahoo Groups list service. We tried forums and there was some interest, but it seems that "push" email discussion lists keep the attention, whereas "pull" forums don't work so well because if the forum isn't so active yet, people have less motivation to check them. With the elist, assuming the volume isn't too high, motivation because secondary because you have a message in your inbox which you "must" read. Beyond this, the only other application our community has grabbed ahold of is our MediaWiki installation. So Bryght, despite Drupal's awesome community features it appears to me in my great ignorance that it's missing two out the three applications that our actual local area community has put to great use. Drupal has forums, but it lacks a discussion list service, or integration with such, and there's no wiki (at least not that I've seen actually working, lots of talk, but I've seen nothing, and I don't see how Books can be regarded as a wiki). So the two community features that we need most are missing. So, I need some direction here or my local group will not go for any switch to Drupal.
I will add that as volume on our Elist picks up, we try to direct extended discussions to the forums, so the elist becomes more of an "announcement list" (but not one-way, as you can still reply to all), a place to initiate a new discussion, and a community-wide "Alert" system. With repect to the last function, if the activity grows as we expect, we will more strongly encourage moving extended discussions to the forum so that "alert" messages are not lost in the mass of messages. So, we will strive to keep the volume somewhat low volume.