[SGVLUG] Call for webmasters

[Emerson, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Claude Felizardo
> On 6/30/05, Dustin <laurence at alice.caltech.edu> wrote:
> > a SGVLUG test site anyway: http://sgvlug.laurences.net.  I 
> > Check it out, especially the web team.
> > 
> cool.   i've played with mambo and liked it and was thinking of
> hosting a mambo test site for sgvlug but [...]

After messing around for a while, I think I got a reasonably good start.  This does do what I was expecting -- we can add "articles" that correspond to upcoming meetings (and the cool part is that we can write them "now", but delay their appearance until just-after the previous meeting, and the system takes care of it rather than having someone physically remember to "publish" the item)  Some things don't work quite as expected (ordering of lists, mainly, as well as exactly what "content" appears in a given area) but I suspect that is mostly a learning-curve item anyway.

I've put the next couple of meetings in as items.  Jana's presentation on Ubuntu appears "now", and Orv's will appear next week (actually, a couple of days before the next actual meeting, sort of as a really-advanced teaser)  I've also created an "around town" area to advertise OTHER lug's and their meetings (which is why the UUASC-LA item was moved away from the "front page" -- sure, it IS front-page type news, but for UUASC, not SGVLUG...)

There is some concern about the "banner" that appears -- this can be used for good or evil it appears -- for instance, we could create a banner "graphic" that is appropriate for each section and/or group, and then make that the only "banner" that gets selected for the section (at least, I think that is possible)  i.e., we could create a "devsig" banner that appears when listing devsig meeting announcements, a uuasc-la banner for their group, and so on.  Of course, this takes someone with "talent" ;) to actually create nice looking banners.

I presume we have control over the actual layout of the "site", but that appears to be at a somewhat lower level than what we can do as an admin -- at least, I didn't see anything obvious on how to move things like the banner to a different place, or how to change the main graphic, etc.  OTOH, having a "standard" layout makes it easy for people browsing to know "where to look" to do certain things (though I gotta admit it took me a bit of time to find the "login/register" form at first -- it's on the left side towards the bottom, which may be relatively standard, but to be honest I've pretty much avoided any "register to view..." type sites anyway;  to that end, it looks like we can mark most or all of the content "public", and visitors would not have to "register" at all (so we could even do away with the logon, and simply have an admin logon that is entirely separate from the site)