[Eug-lug] website reboot opinions sought

[Quentin Hartman]

On 6/18/06, John Sechrest <sechrest at jas.peak.org> wrote:
>
>
> I think you should have a CMS that enables:
>   - roles
>   - permissions
>   - blocks
>   - mail to members of roles
>   - events
>   - rss feeds
>   - Good searching

I agree with John in that whatever is done, it should be powered by
some sort of CMS. They make delegation so simple and safe that I can't
imagine a real strong argument for not using one in this case.

Personally, I like the general design of the current site. I think if
the stuff that is there already worked it would be perfectly
serviceable for the needs of the group. I'd suggest fixing that stuff
doing a small cosmetic face-lift and that'd be about it.

As a slight aside, I think it would be wise to put some time to define
some goals, or a mission statement, for this redesign. What should the
website do for the lug? Is the goal to be featureful enough to act as
a full portal site for lug members? Is the goal to just act as a way
to get information out about the lug and lug activities? Is it going
to be a general Linux / FOSS advocacy site? The reason I say this is
that if there is no defined scope for the project, I can see a lot of
time getting put into features that are not used or needed. But again,
if the scope of the project is defined as, "Be an experimental site to
play with cool stuff and we don't care if it actually gets put to
use.", then that's ok. I've been involved in several website designs
and redesigns, and ones that didn't clearly define what they wanted to
do were a real pain, and ultimately they failed because people poured
their energy into the wrong things.

-- 
-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-