The itch that needs a scratch came from a computer club I belong to. It has a web site that is woefully out-of-date, difficult to navigate, and difficult to update. I decided to write a new site and this is an explanation what I did.

The club's main focus is to coordinate the meeting of smaller groups or SIGs. It arranges rooms at a local university and holds a general meeting which has a speaker from the industry, a newsletter, a consignment table, and occasional auctions. Oh and a table for coffee and donuts. But I wasn't sure we wanted to provide for that online.

The new site would be a brochure for the man-off-the-street, a portal of information for members, and an easy management for the officers and Board Of Directors of the club. My solution was to use roles extensively. It would allow people with different roles in the club to change the meeting information as they needed so it wasn't all on the backs of the club officers and was more likely to be updated correctly.

It would also allow those roles to communicate with the membership so the club and involve the whole club in its running instead of just a niche of older members. It would automated certain functions like report filing and newsletter production again to spread the responsibility to others and remove the burden from one person.

It would work almost like a viral network but with enough central controls that it cannot get out of hand which some of the officers were very weary of. The board of directors would have a definite role in decision making and a way to correct anything the general membership does.

I started to write a small solution in PHP and MySQL but soon realized that if the site grew as I planned then the small solution would get very large, complex, difficult to maintain, and it would be left to rot when I went onto something else. So for the possibility of scalability.

Then I worked on a small contract that introduced me to Drupal. The small solution fell to the wayside while I created a site that did most of the above using a complex scheme of categories and roles. It would solve the problem with the small changes but would be difficult to make large changes like the club did every year. The main problem is that it would be difficult to maintain without someone with the skills I had acquired.

The next step was to create additional Drupal modules and content types that would automate those tasks with as little effort as possible from the hierarchical top tier.

First a module for simply coordinating the groups and the complex taxonomy I mentioned earlier. Then coordinate the offices each with a different need. Finally the reports that are filed by both SIG leaders and officers for the membership.

The additional functions would be things such as a forum for members to talk or ask questions amongst themselves, automatically generating a newsletter from the reports filed, a way to track membership and dues, and a secure way to allow people to pay dues or make donations to the club. Once ecommerce methods are in place then we might want to run the consignment table from the Internet and have auctions online.

For now, the basic functions are in place and once they have been tested the national organizations for user groups will be alerted to the fact that it is a free solution for anyone interested.

The only problems I fore-see are that it will some serious central planning and it has to run without me at the helm.

A solution like this is going to require a lot of planning to avoid having to redo the whole thing every time our needs change. For the sake of the club I have to prepare for when I am no longer at the club.

Since it is based on a Free Open Source System, it has been donated back to the Open Source community and the computer club is listed as its sponsor. Hopefully that will bring the club some extra PR.