My install profile project

Hiya,

I guess this group is here to talk about install profile projects so here is a post about mine.

I am working on creating an install profile for the Industrial Workers of the World, which is a union I am a member of. Currently the main site there runs drupal but most of the branch sites are hand-coded HTML with various degrees of skill, design etc. I think the Starbucks Worker's Union probably has the nicest site in the union.

Our union is small but growing (fast) and our technology is not keeping pace with us. We have very minimal communication between different branches aside from personal relationships which makes it difficult to avoid reinventing the wheel all the time. So the goals of this profile are, in brief:

• Provide easily updatable, good looking public websites
• Create and manage calendar of events
• Share files
• Secure sensitive content; this is especially important to an organisation such as ours which often is in conflict situations with companies small and huge (like Starbucks)
• Maintain contact lists

Here are some specifics of the plan. I don't think I should paste this whole page here, it would probably be nicer to just post the link: http://www.ottawaiww.org/wobsite1.html
This page was written for wobs, not for drupal geeks, so likely contains some language that doesn't make sense. Oh look I just did it again: a "wobbly" or "wob" is a member of the IWW. Why? There is a glossary if you're really keen to find out but you can probably just guess from context.

I have a good chunk of the work for this done. I am currently tweaking the design, ironing out the bugs and then it will be time to learn about install profiles and find a couple of testers in the union.

I am not a programmer. I can understand basic code and can edit variables but that's about it. I don't know much about MySQL. I use Linux and know my share of CSS/XHTML. The documentation I found about install profiles looked a bit sketchy; it's intimidating. I haven't tried out the modules that say they make it easy yet. I don't have a test box either, I don't really know where to get one. Since there isn't a huge amount of content maybe I can just do a second install on the same host.

I am trying to figure out how best to manage this, especially now that the project has come together enough to start inviting other developers in. I put a call out in the next issue of our internal newsletter and I've been trying hard to recruit geeks within the union.

I don't have a clue what to do about upgrades. I don't know how to use CVS I think it's called.

So that's it. What do you think?