I'm the main person in a new nonprofit group, The Alliance of Military Reunions (Military Reunions=groups of old guys getting together to reunite, reminisce, and rekindle, organized around the ship or unit they served in. The Alliance=a trade association/brotherhood of these groups). We are moving very fast, and we expect to be important. (Well, maybe we'll just be a big school of fish in an itty-bitty pond, but we WILL be important in that ecosystem.)
Our web site at http://www.allmilitaryreunions.org is a vital component of our activities. I created it with a very old WYSIWYG web authoring program called Cute Site Builder. We need it to be better and have more features, and folks have suggested using a CMS. At first look, Drupal seems to offer every single thing that we need, but it might have a bigger learning curve than I am willing to undertake at this point in life.
I seek to know more about Drupal capabilities, and to determine whether I should dig into it more. My dream is to find a human here in Pittsburgh who is willing to talk with me about this stuff.
I'm also the main person in one of the military reunion groups, and I maintain the web site at http://www.ussrankin.org. That site has a similar need, as do many of the web sites of the 150+ reunion groups and 80+ commercial entities that are members of The Alliance.
I live in the North Hills, not far from Ross Park Mall. You can call me at 412-367-1376.
Comments
Drupal has a redonkulously
Drupal has a redonkulously high learning curve though you should investigate using a CMS of some kind to meet your needs. Have you looked into Wordpress at all or even taking a step back from that and looked into something like www.Ning.com or http://www.meetup.com/ . It sounds like you want a social network to enable meetups of people of a certain group / background which is exactly what both of those sites are for. I'd recommend Ning as you could also link to / network more directly with other military / veteran groups. Lot cheaper too as they are both free services and then you'd only have to pay for the domain each year and have it link directly to your ning / meetup space.
Hope that helps, Thank you for your service!
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/
What we need
I've heard about that learning curve. Our guys are old, and definitely NOT into social networking sites. We are more like Penn State Online -- we offer certain information, training, and support to our students (or, in our case, members). We also offer them face-to-face networking opportunities.
I'm looking for a CMS to make it easier to update our online directories, to have members-only areas on our site, etc. When I tell people what we need, they usally reply "CMS." I don't yet speak CMS, but I'm tryin' to learn a few words of it.
I realize that. If you look
I realize that. If you look into the 9/12 movement and how they've organized on Ning.com / meetup.com I'll assure you that not all of their users are young. You're probably thinking of facebook or myspace as social networking when really it's just generically anything that organizes people around something they have in common. On facebook it's more open ended to just being a person and having that in common with people, but ning is more about saying to people "hey everyone join this group cause ur all interested in it" and then giving members the ability to view content specific to them is part of the system. I'd look into it, it'll do a lot of the organizing types of things you're looking for and is really easy for people to sign up for accounts and what not.
Ex Uno Plures
http://elmsln.org/
http://btopro.com/
http://drupal.psu.edu/