[Cialug] Slightly OT, ... an "Online Community"

[Matthew Nuzum]

Well, I was going to suggest Ning, but since you've already gone that far,
then I guess it's out. The next best thing I can think of requires a little
customization, but will totally do what you want.

Wordpress has a feature - it's way more than a plugin, called
BuddyPress[1]. It adds the concepts of groups, chats and more. There are
many add-ons for it that allow you to extend it. For example, there are
many schools or educational groups that use it as a set of classrooms.

The beautiful thing is that it also supports many (all?) other Wordpress
plugins, including the membership plugins. The one I'm using isn't free and
I can't be certain it's the best, but it does what it says and it's easy.
It's called "Membership Pro"[2] There are others that are free though.
Essentially, you can create membership levels and each level equates to a
"role" in Wordpress. It supports subscriptions but I haven't tried that yet.

The beautiful thing about Wordpress is that hosting it is easy and if you
host it yourself optimizing a low-end server for Wordpress is well
understood and documented. All of the features you've described above are
readily available with plugins (though PDF Searching may take a little
effort).

[1] https://buddypress.org/
[2] https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership/

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 10:47 AM, L. V. Lammert <lvl at omnitec.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Apr 2015, jim kraai wrote:
>
> > CMS + phpbb + a mailing list manager is good for most of that
> >
> > give us a wish list to work with
> >
> The big enchilada:
>
>  * Annual Membership fee [required for security]
>  * Discussions on a variety of topics/subtopics
>  * Pictures [organized in some manner?]
>  * Future Events, discussions about
>  * Document Archives, PDF searching
>  * Rotating 'special notes'
>  * Clean/flat design or template options
>
> If Ning would allow fees, it would be a fair starting point, but we tried
> that years ago and were not successful.
>
>         Lee
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Matthew Nuzum
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