[TriLUG] Organizational calendar/forum recommendations

Rick DeNatale rick.denatale at gmail.com
Fri Jan 13 13:09:20 EST 2006


I'm looking for recommendations/experiences with FOSS solutions for
controlled forums and shared calendars.

I just might shortly find myself in the position of becoming a
regional coordinator for a national non-profit organization.

As such the major part of my responsibilities would be to keep an
official calendar of events sponsored by local chapters in the
Carolinas and try to minimize conflicts in scheduling (they compete
for attendees/vendors etc.).  I'd have very little power to dictate to
chapters, but I would control the official regional calendar which
would determine whether individual events were sanctioned by the
national organization.

One of the things I'd like to do is make the event planning more
transparent and open, so that chapters could let other chapters know
what they were thinking about before two chapters inadvertantly set up
conflicting events, something which has happened with surprising
frequency.

What I've been thinking about is setting up a website which tracked
potential and committed events on a calendar.  I'd need permissions
controls which would keep the official status of events under my
control, and allow chapter representatives to edit their own proposed
events but not muck with each others.

I've been using webcalendar at home to keep calendars for my wife,
myself and the household, and I suppose I could work something out
using it's layered calendar views, but I'm thinking that it might
become unwieldy.

Also, I'd like to use the website for general communication within and
about the chapter, so other functions like a forum and/or one or
multiple blogs might be useful.

I've been using mediawiki for some time for other purposes, and love
it, but I think that I need a more controlled environment for this
job.  I've started to look at various CMS solutions, but I'm not sure
exactly how to evaluate them.  The two likely candidates at first
glance are drupal and plone.

I seem to see drupal being mentioned more frequently, but on the other
hand, plone is officially supported on ubuntu.  Both seem to have some
calendar/events functionality but it's not clear from either's web
site how functional/easy either would be to adapt to my requirements.

Now that I've probably put everyone to sleep, any comments? Bueller! Bueller!

--
Rick DeNatale

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