I did my part to try to get something for the San Francisco Bay Area Alumni Chapter while thoses over at Antiochians.org get there act together. However I'm going to step back and watch from now on.
- I setup a Newsletter system which just needed to be populated with Alumni Data
- I setup CiviCRM to help with fund raising.
- lastly a basic forum, since all the damn mailing lists keep cross posting
public calendar for events
All of which I gave access to a few people to play around with. Its been over a week and I havent' noticed anyone testing the site or its features. The only contact I did get was to remove a post from the official Antiochians Forum asking people to try it out. Sure they are busy, so am I. I don't want to be wasting my time setting up tools that nobody cares to use or evern try.
The folks over at Antiochians.org know whats best for them. I'm not going to waste more of my time with the SFBA Chapter doing web or DB stuff. They want an all-in-one website which has growing pains. I do find it interesting that they are replicating much of what happens over here on this website. Its nice to be copied for a good cause.
I know my demo site isn't the best looking. Its using a stock unmodified template that happens to favor larger type. Most themes theses days have smaller fonts and the layout is a fixed width. My personal oppinion is a fixed width site looks great but does not scale. My laptop is widescreen and I should beable to use all of it. Not be trapped to a limited width. If you now someone with bad eyesite ask them about fixed width or even worse Flash based websites.
Comments
Nice
Yazz - Nice job with all those additions. The thing is you keep saying 'the folks over at Antiochians.org' and last I knew you were one of 'us'. I thought you were going to test out CiviCRM and get back to us. I just checked my e-mail and I don't see any mention that you had a demo of this up, though maybe spam filters ate it. I just kind of assumed you were busy with SFBA stuff since Kelly Kersting had mentioned she'd tapped you to do DB stuff (and then you mentioned as much in your blog last week or so).
Since then a recent alum, Jon Estes has started setting joomla/civiCRM and other stuff up. I'm sure he'd like some help. This doesn't have to be an us/them thing, basically whatever people are asking for or willing to do we've been doing. It could use some cohesion instead of installs of multiple software and I was kind of assuming that something like joomla/drupal probably with CiviCRM would be that. All I know is I don't have time to try to set it up myself.
Anyways it's all been a blur, I've been up until 2 AM every night for the past month or so doing stuff related to this, responding to e-mails etc. You're totally right antiochians.org is ending up copying alot of what you have here. And as I mentioned above we could use your help moving it forward.
I also still see a purpose for this site even after all is sadi and done. As I said in my e-mail to you on 7/3 "I do respect your stance on the anonymous postings and the need for a place for whistle blowers. A number of people have been asking for a list of names & job titles of layoffs and other 'sensitive' documents that obviously cant go on the 'official' site that is now antiochians.org. I kind of imagine thats how the dust is going to settle here, antiochians.org will be the alumni board site but with various pieces for multiple contributors and antirecord.org can fill in the gaps when needed."
This may even be sooner than later since the Alumni Board seems pretty clear that it wants to 'play nice' with the BOT and thus probably wont be happy if it's site starts being filled with lots of negative BOT content. So far they've been fine with the idea of a disclaimer, where it will be clear what's 'official' AB content and what's not.
But anyways, to sum up, it's not 'the folks over at Antiochians.org', you're welcome to have as much access as any of the rest of us if you want to jump in. If you just want to keep this site & planetantioch.org going, that's great too. Whatever it takes to make things happen.
-Matt
Oh and one more thing
" The only contact I did get was to remove a post from the official Antiochians Forum asking people to try it out."
Who told you to remove a post? WTF? This is the first I've heard of this.
-Matt