Anyone interested in collaborating on a "recipe" for Boy Scout Troops

You have some good ideas here.

The only thing is, in my opinion, a couple of the ideas may be a little ambitious for the average troop site.

Most troops I'm familiar with have 25-35 boys and a handful of scouters. Add in a few of the more involved parents and you have a user base of maybe 50-60. The Web site is handy for a lot of stuff with a group that size, but forums and organic groups might be overkill.

The reason I say that is because of the 100-10-1 rule. For most sites, for every 100 people who visit, only 10 will register to use a forum and only one will become an active participant. A scouts site might be a little different in terms of user loyalty/participation, but I've seen attempts at these features before that didn't seem to work and it's probably proof of the rule of thumb.

I'm rebuilding a site that was in Drupal 5 and just upgraded to Drupal 6. I blew up a few things and intend to make additional changes before adding some new features, but for now it uses some of the same ideas you have about locations, maps, calendars, etc.

I hope to add soon resources, like packing lists and recipes. I've had a similar idea of an Eagle Scout hall of fame and have given thought to how that would be done.

A couple things to add to your list:

-- a photo gallery (I had one for a while in Drupal 5, but wasn't satisfied with it)

-- Simplenews email list (I was testing it in Drupal 5, but have not yet implemented in Drupal 6)

You're welcome to check out the site now, but keep in mind it's pretty bare bones because of the recent upgrade and conversion.

http://www.bsa224.us

Unfortunately, this is not the only site I manage in my "spare" time, so it doesn't always get the attention it needs.

Jim Smith
ASM, Troop 224, Oak Ridge, Tenn.

CCK for activities with locations, maps, packing lists, signup and calendar
Organic groups for patrols and possibly ASMs and committee

You should consider the Event module. Event comes with a calendar page, calendar block, and an upcoming events block, all subscribeable with iCal.

Signup adds registration to the event module. Most valuable, is Signup can sent eMail blasts to those people signed up for an event, and allows you to track who did/didn't show up.

My experience has been to avoid the Calendar+Date module - I have had too many sites break on account of that combo. There is also the dependency on PHP 5.2+. I run CentOS (RedHat Enterprise Server) 5 on my servers for the enterprise stability, so do a lot of other ISPs out there. RHES5 comes with PHP 5.1. I have come across of a lot of ISPs lately that are still running PHP 4.

Organic Groups are a great addition for Patrols, et. al.

Forums for documents and resources

Forums and Polls are great for discussing activities and topics, however I wouldn't use forums for a document repository.

I usually attach any relevant document to a "page" or to a the "event" the document refers to.

However, if you're looking for straight-up document-repository, I would create a custome content type, use the built-in file-upload module, and taxonomy for categorizing the documents.

Link library for external resources

I've always thought that any relevant links should be in the body of a page or in the menu.

Content type for Eagle scout "hall of fame" listing project, scout, organization, service hours

That's a good one. CCK+Views could do this well.