[SGVLUG] Call for webmasters

[Dustin]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, David Lawyer wrote:

> So how many people are needed for maintaining a LUG site whose main
> purpose is to let people know about meetings and other LUG activities?

It's a good question.  However, I'm not sure whether we currently have a
simple site because our needs are simple, or rather because it was all 
hand-maintained html on the shoulders of someone who has switched to a Mac 
and really wished we'd relieve him of the burden. :-)

> The UCLA and USC LUGs seem to mirror various Linux distributions, etc.
> but this requires a lot of bandwidth.

I doubt this makes sense for us.

Distro mirrors make a great deal of sense for a university (especially 
relatively rich, agressive universities like UCLA and USC--let alone 
'Tech, which used to have and I'm sure still has some Distro mirrors in 
UGCS).  They tend to have lots of disk space and many heavy bandwidth 
users on their local nets.  We have neither disk space nor a LAN, so I 
can't see how this makes any sense for us...the low-tech "Box O' Linux"
approach seems to be the closest analog.

> A practical use of multiple access would be for SIGs but SGVLUG only
> seems to have one active.

Good point.

> So while I still don't think it was worth the effort to use a cms, it
> seems that much of the effort has already been expended so why not
> utilize it.

So you've kind of hit at the heart of the matter: how much more would we 
do with the website if it were easier to share the load and create more 
content?  If a lot, then a CMS becomes more of a win.  If not much, then I 
agree it's overkill.  My perception is that there is at least some pent-up 
need for easier site management.  Whether it is enough to justify a CMS 
is, I suppose, the question (I hope) we are investigating.

That's in the abstract, of course.  The specific question is what the web 
volunteers decide they prefer--they have to live with it the most, so it 
makes sense to me that they make the final decision after playing with 
alternatives and seeing how the members respond.  If we had only one 
simple page and our only volunteer wanted to maintain it in something 
really heavy-duty (Zope+Plone? :-) I guess I'd vote to give the person 
offering free labor the tool he wants (as long as it fits the budget, 
which is around $0 for software).

Those of you who aren't actively playing with the test installations might
ponder and comment on this issue.  What do you *wish* we had on the
website, and most importantly what do *you* wish you could do on it?

As a concrete example of something we're not as likely to do on a
hand-maintained page as with something fancier, I have created a photo
gallery on the PHPWebSite installation.  Useless?  Well, yes, except
sometimes I don't put together names on the mailing list with faces at the
meetings, and pictures of the members would be sort of useful there.

I'll do the same on Mambo soon, but that turns out to be more complex.

Dustin