[cumbria_lug] Projects...

[Schwuk]

Schwuk wrote:
> Does anyone have any suggestions for something suitable?

My suggestion, and the obvious one, is the website.

Web design is (relatively) easy, and PHP is simple language to pick up, 
so even the 'newbies' can get involved. What I have in mind for the 
website (but don't have the time to do myself) is a custom Content 
Management System (CMS). Admittedly, there are lots of CMS's out there, 
but I've not found one particularly suited to running a LUG. A LUG is 
not really about news, so the likes of Slashcode, PHP-Nuke and Scoop 
aren't really suited, nor is our community (currently) large enough to 
support the likes of those.

In terms of features, I'm thinking:
  - News feeds - RSS feeds from Slashdot, O'Reilly etc.
  - Article publishing
  - Meeting planner (see my other note about meetings)
  - Lending Library (ala OpenDb - http://opendb.sourceforge.net/ )
  - Member pages/diarys/blogs/screenshots etc.
  - Bulletin Board (possibly)

...and I'm sure others can think of more. Obviously, if we wanted to do 
this quickly we could just use various products (like PHP-Nuke, OpenDb 
and phpBB) and tie them together in some way (authentication and 
consistant look'n'feel are the major problems with this approach), but 
because this is 'for fun', we can start from scratch and build things 
the way we want, if we want.

At the end of the day, we could build something that will directly 
benefit the LUG, and (if we build it right) other LUGs as well.

What do you think?

Cheers,
--
Schwuk