[Cialug] ? Open Source Group Software

[Matthew Nuzum]

Three things to consider:

Drupal - not really a resource hog by most standards, but it is an
amazingly flexible system that will happily let you shoot yourself in the
foot. Think of it as a tool like MS Access. You start out with something
that looks like an ultra basic CMS but what you really have is a a database
and development framework that is mostly controlled using a web based UI.

Wordpress - try this before anything else to see if it will work for you.
BuddyPress is a great plugin and is the foundation for a lot of other great
plugins for collaboration. wpmudev.org is a website focused on tutorials
and plugins for people doing this stuff. The reason why I suggest WP as
first choice is because it's about the easiest to try, has some of the best
documentation and community support. As far as security and performance
concerns, is very well understood. Yes, it's a bigger target, but the
update system for security updates is very mature and there are numerous
people in the community and on this list who know how to deal with it.

Another one to look into is a slightly different beast: Zentyal is more
like an open source Exchange replacement, but it does focus on helping
groups communicate. You would use your e-mail/calendar/notes applications
on your computer or phone to access the data, but it also has a web
interface. Compared to the two above, it is a resource hog. I think you may
be able to install it on a VM with 1GB of RAM if you enable swap. Once you
give it enough resources it's not a crazy-hard installation.

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 10:52 AM, jim kraai <jimgkraai at gmail.com> wrote:

> Looking for your suggestions and experience ...
>
> I know it's come up before, but am hoping some of the answers have changed
> over time.
>
> I'm in a couple of non-technical nonprofits that don't really want to
> budget any $ on anything that's not 1960s level tech.  There's good
> pressure from within to update that.
>
> They each need a web site, member/mailing list management, and more modern
> features.  I don't know what more modern features are or should be--maybe
> self-management of annual dues, event management, forums, publish photo
> galleries or link to external photo gallery site.  I'm keeping the
> 'required features' list fluid as I'll go with whatever a suite offers.  A
> member forum would be nice.  Per-member blogs would be OK, but I'd prefer
> to link to something external for that.
>
> Each club has 50 < members < 100, so that puts us out of the free range of
> most online places.
>
> Low/mid level technical skill in maintenance is important.  I'll host at my
> expense for life, but I don't wish to be web master for life on the
> day-to-day content and member management fiddling, if you get my drift.
>
> Things that are off the table are:
> - Yahoo Groups--rotting from within
> - G+:  cost and lack of features
> - Facebook:  guessing it'll cost plenty soon and lack of features
>
> It's my impression that:
> - Drupal is a resource hog
> - Joomla is a resource hog and has been hacked every way imaginable
> - WP is less of a hog, but suffers continuous popularity-hacking
>
> I don't quite understand Google for Nonprofits, it seems like little more
> than a self-promotion tool--a way to put ads out there.
>
> There are things that look almost nice like:
> - http://www.memberplanet.com/nonprofit.aspx
> - http://www.clubmaster.org/
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-- 
Matthew Nuzum
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