Quoting MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop:
What should go on the site? At the moment, there's three sections (background, meetings and venues) and some pages and subsites, some of which need updating, moving or culling.
I guess the thing is to consider who will be using the site, which will be people new to the group and existing members. So there needs to be intro stuff about the systems ALUG covers, info about the group and how things work, maybe some sort of member directory, for the newbies. Then for both newbies and existing members there can be the pages about the local groups and meetings, maybe with more details of past meetings so people can know what to expect and stuff? Then, mainly for the existing members there could be pages about specific projects that people are working on together, say.
I don't like the suggestion that the whole site be a wiki.
Agreed.
ALUG has a problem that when people get busy, they often get too busy to hand over tasks. If all webmasters of the current site die, it would just sit there, going out-of-date. If all webmasters of a wiki die, it usually gets exploited and trashed.
Which might be an argument for having a system in place where as many ALUGers as possible have access to editing pages, whilst not having a wiki free-for-all situation. That way, there is always someone to pick things up in the event of things falling behind on a page.
By the way, the Shropshire LUG site suggested as a nice design also has double navigation, error messages and "search-engine unfriendly" URLs - all things which don't happen much with xhtml files and they can be mirrored more easily, although we don't have mirrors just now. It's also a little cheeky not to link back to LUG.org.uk IMO. Yes, a fairly nice style, though.
Yeah, I should have specified, it was from a style point of view that I suggested it, rather than it being a classic piece of website coding!
Could the library be integrated into a new site, too?
-- Dave Briggs linux@davebriggs.net | http://davebriggs.net | http://palimpsest.org.uk
On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 09:19 +0100, Dave Briggs wrote:
Could the library be integrated into a new site, too?
Yes it can, thanks to the generosity of Darren who has kindly organised the facilities I need to migrate it from it's current hiding place to PHP4Hosting.
So I am pretty much out of excuses and will move the Library as soon as I get some spare moments. Sadly my work schedule has gone from "busy" to "painful" the past few weeks so it may be a little while.
From an visual point of view I think it would need a bit of a re-theme
to be a seamless integration with the Alug pages, in my opinion visually it needs some work anyway. As it stands it is pretty much just a standard OpenDB site with some hacks that make it more suitable for book lending (OpenDB by design is more about Media Lending)
During the move I hope to upgrade it to a more recent version of OpenDB and after that may be asking for help in tidying it up somewhat, so if anyone feels that they could help please make yourself known.
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Dave Briggs -
Wayne Stallwood