NCG Website

[drewan]

While I'm sick and not feeling like going out, I thought it would be good to focus on some old web projects that I haven't touched in a while.

I've owned the nggaylaxians.com/org domains for a long time, to function as a website for our local North Country Gaylaxians club (a local L.G.B.T. science fiction group). The original site was just flat HTML. Later I installed phpbb to run the site, but something change on the server that broke the installation so I scrapped the site. I haven't gotten back to the site since then. This means that the ncgaylaxians.com/org site has been down for a long time.

Two events in the last week have reminded me that I need to rebuild this site. The first event was when boywhocantsayno sent me an e-mail telling me that the new Gaylactic Network website was just about done, and asking if we have an NCG site to link to.

The second was when a member of the NCG Yahoo Group, Maria, e-mailed the group and said that she would be willing to put together a new site using some kind of CMS, but due to her only programming in ASP, she would have to host the site since my sever (Dreamhost) doesn't suport ASP.

I'd love to have someone build a new NCG site, but I don't want to give up control of the domain.

So I've been looking at some other CMS solutions, like Joomla and a newer version of phpBB. Dreamhost has automated installs of these two programs, so its very easy to setup the basic site. I did install Joomla, but I very quickly got stuck on how to customize it to our needs. I've since uninstalled Joomla and re-placed our "House Cleaning" message on the front page of the site.

Anyone here have experience with Joomla or phpBB? I need help to customize it for the club.

Oh... you may ask why I need a dynamic site for a simple little scifi club. Well, I don't really. But I want to make it easy for our members to update content on the site without having to go through me. Plus, in 2009 we are hosting Gaylaxicon here (G.L.B.T. Science Fiction convention), and I want it to be simple for departments to update content.

Plus, I host and manage the websites for several other groups. (The Gaylactic Network, Atons of Minneapolis, SF Minnesota, Diversicon, Spectrum Awards, and others). I'd like to get them all into some kind of CMS at some point, and the NCG site is a good guinea pig.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Plus, in 2009 we are hosting Gaylaxicon here (G.L.B.T. Science Fiction convention), and I want it to be simple for departments to update content.

holy fucking shit. really? wow. this is what i look like when i'm volunteering.

[makes note to get self to betsy's back porch meeting one of these days]

[dangerdhotrod.livejournal.com]

i just set up joomla and it seems pretty cool. i think it would work just fine for what you want to do. i haven't finished a site with it or anything, but i've messed around with the interfaces and stuff. the only thing that is not so cool is that it is not so easy to make a template with it i think. so you have to find some free template to make it look somewhat close to what you want but it will never be exactly what you want.

like for customizing - i would say if there is an add-on type thing that does what you want then it is easy to customize it that way, but if you want to get in the guts and change how it works then you are going to need someone with good experience and patience in doing that sort of thing, and it would be more work than it would be worth.

i would say just try it out at home and see what you think!

[alierajean.livejournal.com]

We use Joomla for PokerFox, but I'm not the one who customized it. Mostly I just sign people up. I don't know how well you know hatfield13 (Adam Stemple), but he's pretty familiar with Joomla and could probably help you out with it. Or if you just have a few questions I could re-lay them.

Random Note: Thanks for posting about Blood Ties, I'd completely forgotten about it until you posted.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

We started using Xoops for the Polaris 21 website this year. I don't know anything about it from the technical POV (apart from the fact that it's open source, and written in PHP, and it seems to do what you're looking for), but you might want to have a look and see what you think.