The steady decline of membership in community organizations has slowed in the last few years as a new wave of younger people gets involved. In many cases, however, these organizations are still lagging behind when it comes to communicating via the web; older members may not immediately recognize the value of a web site as a powerful recruiting and communication tool. Even if they do, they may not be fortunate enough to have a member who is willing and able to undertake the building and upkeep of a web site.
A "Drupal for Lodges" install profile developed by members of these organizations who also happen to know their way around Drupal could be a huge help, and would hopefully bring together some collective best practices that people have come up with in their individual efforts.
Drupal Updates from OSI Days 2010 - Open Source Conference, Chennai - September 19-21, 2010
Conference Details - http://osidays.com
Drupal Sessions with Overview and details: http://osidays.com/tracks/60
Conference Registration - http://osidays.com/register-now
Shortlisted Sessions:
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This may come in handy
Lullabot rocks! 5-Step Drupal Distributions
Read moreMassachusetts Freemasonry 2.0
The Grand Lodge of Masons in Massachusetts is looking at ways to engage current and prospective members with social media: http://www.massfreemasonry.org/index.tpl?&ng_view=56&ng_id=217
It will be interesting to see what develops, and whether open source CMSes might come into play.
Read moreInstall Profile feature/wish list
I'd like to brainstorm some of the typical features that would make sense to include on an "out of the box" lodge web site:
- WYSIWYG editor
- IMCE
- Calendar
- News page
- Officer profiles
- Photo galleries
- Private OG for committees and other internal discussion groups
- Access control for members-only content / downloads
- Roles for members, officers, content editors
- Contact form
- Path/Pathauto
- Stock top-level pages & primary links ("About/History/FAQ/Contact")
Who's already using Drupal for a Lodge/Chapter/Post website?
I met a few of you at Drupalcon DC, so I know there are some of us out there. Post a link to your site here, and maybe a few implementation details (Which version of Drupal, themes, modules, etc.)
I'll go first:
North Quabbin Lodge, A.F. & A.M. - Drupal 5. Nothing fancy yet; the theme is based on Barlow and the site is pretty straightforward, using CCK/views/Date/Calendar.