Introduce yourself

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
pdube's picture

Greetings all & Welcome!

We are getting to the point where I think we should introduce ourselves. Please state your real name, title, the organization you work for, whether you are a developer or netFORUM customer, and what value you hope to obtain from participation in this group.

Comments

Greetings all! My name is

pdube's picture

Greetings all!

My name is Paul Dube, Senior IT Manager for The Craft & Hobby Association (CHA). We are a netFORUM customer. We started a very small use of Drupal about 1 1/2 years ago, implementing only forums for member communication. At that time, we implemented the module James created to integrate authentication so our members could use the same user name & password.

Over the past year or so, we have been considering implementing a "real" CMS to reduce our costs for developing our show sites. We have 3 shows this year and the development of each site is ~$25,000 - we contract Avectra to do most of it simply because it is too time consuming, therefore easier to do it this way.

Paying attention to the users group, I noticed there were enough other customers interested in using Drupal that the idea for this project was born. I hope we can leverage each other's resources to avoid each paying for the same development, develop something really useful to a significant number of netFORUM customers, end up with something that can take on a life of its own and flourish, draw other netFORUM users into the group to further leverage resources, and have a lot of fun doing something unusual... get a herd of cats working together to solve a common need.

I think we can really achieve some great synergy and wind up with something far more useful than if we attempted it on our own. I look forward to each member's participation!

Please comment on the existing threads and feel free to start your own topic!

Regards,
Paul

Regards,
Paul

My name is Tim Ward and I am

oldtownit's picture

My name is Tim Ward and I am President and Founder of Old Town IT, LLC, a software development and consulting firm dedicated to serving the netFORUM community. Prior to that I was the CTO at Avectra and was one of the original architects of netFORUM. I am a developer at heart.

I am fairly new to Drupal but recently starting working on a project for an association that is redoing their web site in Drupal with need to to integrate to netFORUM. They are planning to start with the existing Drupal/netFORUM modules but it's very likely enhancements will be needed.

I look forward to participating with this group.

Best,

Tim Ward
tim@oldtownit.com

Tim Ward
President
Old Town IT, LLC
(703) 838-2039
http://oldtownit.com

Good to see everyone!

james.michael-hill@drupal.org's picture

Hello Everyone, I'm quite pleased to see the interest in the modules that has sprung up. I wrote the modules to scratch my own itch looking for a CMS that would integrate with netFORUM and a big thanks to the Utilities Telecom Council for supporting that and opening them up to the world at large. UTC's needs drove the feature set of the first releases of the modules. I've done some work here and there to update things in response to new feature requests, but it'd be great to have more input from people on all fronts.

Hi, I'm Tony Vinski from

printing's picture

Hi, I'm Tony Vinski from Printing Industries of America. We just went live with what I call a Drupal/netForum hybrid system where we're pulling a lot of data from netForum (i.e. staff directory, list of chapters, etc) but using eWeb to pushing other data back (i.e. online purchases and registrations).

We are using James' module though our developer modified it for Drupal 6 and fixed a small bug where it kept resetting user passwords when admins changed a user's role (James, I suppose I should get these updates/patches on the module page). We also modified the SSO module so that it actually creates the netForum cookies. When I get some time I can package this up for public consumption.

My main goal for this project is to eliminate our need for eWeb by creating an api-type module that will allow us to pass data from Drupal on to netForum using the new xWeb methods for 2.2. Our interests are focused on online sales, event registrations, membership sales & renewals, and awards entries.

Between me and the programmer I have on staff we're hoping to move the project along fairly quickly because the sooner we're off eWeb the better. Unfortunately, since we just went live, our entire organization is eager for us to build upon Drupal's capabilities and add new features so finding time to contribute to this project will be difficult.

Hopefully there will be enough people and energy to keep this train rolling even as we have to tend to our "day jobs".

Introduction

Nleslie's picture

I am Nancy Leslie with CAI, a non-profit employers group. We having been using Netforum officially for a year now and are probably the last group to build their website inside of Netforum using the CMS module. For us this was a huge step forward as it finally integrated most of our data and streamed lined our events (of which we have over 400 a year). I believe we will out grow the CMS capabilities in couple of years and will be faced with implementing another system. Sharepoint is beyond our resources in a number of ways. Drupal is Intriguing as until we purchased Netforum we were open source users for almost everything. I am excited that Avecta is exposing the hooks so that other options are possible. Plus we have discovered that there is a fairly active Drupal community locally. Our interests are similar to Tony's but our issue is that our memberships are through organizations. As for resources we bring to the table unfortunately they are not a lot. We have limited IT resources internally and our developer has declined to participate at the moment but I could see him joining if things progress. (after throwing him into the Netforum world he is very leary of any new projects we bring him). I do think we have skills to help develop/review the end user processes and are open to being involved how ever we can be. N

Hello

kayceedub@drupal.org's picture

My name is Karen Walsh. I'm a developer at the National Retail Federation. We are in the very early phases of implementing Netforum along with the font-end websites using Drupal to complement it. We are looking to have Netforum do the membership authentication and provide other member information on the Drupal site. There will probably be other things we would need it to do but will know more as we finish up the requirements gathering part of this.

I am looking to contribute in any way I can to this project, either as a developer or tester or just as a sounding board.

Karen

National Legal Aid & Defender Association

toddchris's picture

Hello Everyone,

My name is Todd Christensen, and I'm the IT Manager at NLADA. We are looking to move to a NetForum/Drupal 6 implementation within the next 2-3 months, but have been concerned that the interface modules may not be there anytime soon. We are also interested in finding those who would like to connect committees in NetForum with Organic Groups. OG seems to offer more robust functionality, but it would be neet to allow some of these groups to map back to member types and/or committees.

I think this is a great idea to have this group. I hope things can ramp up quickly.

Best,
Todd

Hi Todd, Thanks for posting

pdube's picture

Hi Todd,

Thanks for posting this. I agree Organic Groups looks like a great tool, as does the Books module.
If you have a preject ready to be funded, please post it (I will be doing so next week - no more stalling, if an internal department isn't ready their requirements will have to be a separate project). Hopefully, others will want the same functionality and contribute specs as well as funds.

Best regards,
Paul

Regards,
Paul

Hi, my name is Lora

llpseufert's picture

Hi, my name is Lora Parker. I'm the database manager at AACSB International. We have had Netforum for a little over a year now and are looking for something like Drupal to help where eWeb falls flat. I am looking to for more information on how to improve things and will contribute in any way I can (tester and sounding board) but would love guidance to becoming a developer.

Lora Parker
Database Manager
AACSB International

Hi Lora, Welcome! We look

pdube's picture

Hi Lora,

Welcome! We look forward to your contributions. :D

I am assuming you mean developing in netFORUM.
If so, visit the wiki: http://wiki.avectra.com/NetFORUM, especially the Developer's section: http://wiki.avectra.com/Tech_Portal - you can start with the Data Model: http://wiki.avectra.com/Data_Model

The Toolkit training will give you the basic tools you need to manipulate forms and tables.

hth,
Paul

Regards,
Paul

Lora.. just like you!

szymas's picture

I am a dba for both oracle and MS and a developer in Coldfusion.. we just signed on to netforums and will be the first to go live with 3.x in early December. I am looking forward to help in any ways I can.. I just took the toolkit/data model and reporting services training and will like some direction to help out. We use the Advertising and events/exhibition modules heavily and I know that is where e-web is really hurting.. I am curious to know though, and hope that no one snaps at me.. why Drupal was picked over other open systems like Joomla and .net-nuke that have a much larger following and more base modules to expand on?

Chuck Szymaszek
Manager of Information Technologies
Wire Association International, Inc.

If idiots could fly, the sky would be pitch-black..

Some butterfly somewhere did it!

james.michael-hill's picture

Hi Chuck-

I wrote the existing netFORUM Drupal modules about three years ago now, and at the time the requirement was: integrate netFORUM with some manner of CMS that internal staff could use to do what they needed. The field was wide open, and there were many different CMS systems with lots and lots of features which meant the big constraint was, ah, me. I looked at Joomla and .net-nuke, but the following size and base modules for each seemed pretty comparable. I could find interesting Drupal modules easier than with the other systems, the documentation and APIs were easier for me to flip through, and I was more confident with PHP which is how you all got Drupal. The good news is that there is a PHP class I built to handle communication between netFORUM and PHP which is not tied to Drupal, smart people have come up with other PHP to xWeb communication methods, and the Avectra wiki has samples for lots of other languages so if you want to use Drupal I think you've got a leg up, but it's not the only game in town.

I suppose the summary is because three years ago, I thought it was the best fit for my needs. Things may have changed since then, but I still think Drupal is a solid platform.

Welcome Chuck! It will be

pdube's picture

Welcome Chuck!

It will be good to get your input on things! No snapping here... it's fairly simple actually.

Drupal was chosen because many of the members of this group had already invested in it (to some degree or another) or were already considering it, it has a very large developer community, many useful modules to incorporate (CiviCRM and ubercart for examples), and one of our developer members (James Michael-Hill) has already done some integration with netFORUM which we can use as a starting point.

Regards,
Paul

Regards,
Paul

still confused about the thrust of netforum

netbible's picture

paul I have been following your posts here on netforum drupal
we run a drupal site for our Bible content http://bible.org and we also run a forum using phpbb http://forum.bible.org
I would like to get the forum more integrated with our drupal site and am looking for a more native drupal integration of a good forum with great admin features.
the drupal forum is very weak in that area..
I have read some about the netforum and i am a little confused about its thrust...
is it targeted at the forum crowd like PhpBB 3 or vBulletin
--
David Austin (Executive Director www.Bible.org )
~ Check out our free Bible Study tool at http://www.netbible.org
-----


Director of www.bible.org . The home of the NET Bible and thousands of trustworthy Bible study materials all available as a free download to the world
see http://netbible.org a free web based Bible Study Environment
see http://labs.bibl

David, netForum is a bit of a

printing's picture

David, netForum is a bit of a misnomer. It's actually a web-based Association Management Software; not a message/bulletin board software. netForum is used by trade associations and other membership groups to manage their organizations. This group is for netForum customers who want to integrate their Drupal website with their netForum software.