[Beds] Website

[Alan Pope]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 01:04:06PM +0100, Stephen Newey wrote:

Hmm, I've re-read this and it might sound too negative, that's not how it's
meant.

> Hi all
> 
> Everything's now been changed so I'm the admin for the Beds LUG. Many  
> thanks to Neil for all his efforts over the past few years and for  
> his advice in taking the reins.
> 

Best of luck! Running a LUG can be a painful, thankless and time consuming
task. Here's hoping you can help foster a great community!

> A nice feature of Plone is that each member would be able to maintain  
> their own section of the site where you can write articles, post news  
> and photos and highlight upcoming events. These items are then easily  
> publicised on the main news and events page of the site through a  
> simple workflow system.
> 

A great idea. However I word of warning. LUG members won't maintain the
site, period. You have to lead by example, often putting a lot of time and
effort in yourself to get content in there. On the whole most LUGs have a
core of a few people who actually do most of the work with a few others
helping out here and there. The "general population" of the LUG may use the
mailing list and/or forums if you have them but more often than not will not
actually generate any content at all.

I'm not pulling this out of my hat, and I don't want you to take this as a
put-down. I've witnessed many LUGs put content management systems in place
and they ALL - bar very few - end up getting stale because nobody updates
them.

If you can devote the time to keeping it fresh and motivating others to
maintain it also then that's fantastic and you'll have a great resource, if
not, it will likely whither and die.

> If you're all happy with this I can get it set up ASAP. If you've got  
> a better idea, please say!
> 

Have a wiki to make it really easy for people to add/edit content?

Install a planet to aggregate LUG member Blogs? This helps to keep the site
up to date and helps to foster the community spirit.

> Finally, we need a logo! Send any suggestions or indeed mockups or  
> finished logos to the list (you'll need to keep it below 30Kb or so,  
> if it's bigger let me know and I'll bump up the message size limit).  
> Then we can all decide which we prefer.
> 

You might want to mail logos directly rather than fill the archive with them.

Cheers,
Al.