GNHLUG web site / wiki - suggestions wanted

[Star]

On 8/9/07, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
>   GNHLUG has a website: http://www.gnhlug.org
>
>   It currently takes the form of a wiki, run by the TWiki software
> (http://twiki.org).  I'm wondering what people here think they might
> want or would be useful in terms of the GNHLUG website.
>


All in all, I love the direction this one is going, and though my
views are a little narrowed, I'll try and answer your question from my
perspective as a quiet (lately), but interested user:

I'm completely behind the idea that the home-page/entry-point should
not be wiki-ed or editable in an easy (ish) fashion.  I know that it
goes against the grain, but GNHLUG's entry point ought to be the least
changing portion of the site.  Headlines, calendars and such should be
displayed, yes, but within a framework that doesn't change much.

I have to second your vote for MediaWiki.  With a clean layout,
familiar look-and-feel (thank you Wikipedia) and all of the points
that you've raised, it's one of those "just makes sense" kind of
rules.  TWiki hurts my brain in its differences, and I (for one) don't
have enough spare cycles to learn a one-off wiki system that will be
used nowhere else.

Calendars are also fairly straight forward...  A decent PHP calendar
rendering tool is PHP-calendar.  Oddly, they use MW to render their
homepage too, so that appears to almost blow my first argument out of
the water, but I can live with that...  But a decent calendar that
gives us the ability to link back to wiki articles would appear to
fill the needs in that regard, even if the only link creates a page
for the date.

I don't really speak with ~any~ authority on this except in watching
what diverse groups have used.  I don't claim that this is a direct
representation for that.  The current GNHLUG homepage looks, well,
geeky...  Although it has bonus points for that with the regulars, I
still maintain that romantic view of selling the idea of FOSS and GNU
and Linux to non-geeks (I'm up to three now).  There are a bazillion
places on the 'Net that I've pointed people to (yes, that's a precise
count), but I'd love to say "Hey, take a look at www.gnhlug.org, oh,
and by the way, they hold local meetings at xyz places too."  Won't
bring them in in masses, but it couldn't hurt to have it look good
too.

Maybe I'll spend some time mocking up what I'm thinking and publishing a link...

(and with my third hand...)

~ *