Red Ravens

Hi guys,

Here's my plan for the Red Ravens website. Let me know what you think, what is important, and what should be skipped. Register an account and use the reply button at the bottom of this page.

We are using Drupal to build this website. Drupal allows any approved person with webaccess to add articles, photos, videos, and notices.

Reasons for a website:-

• To make it easier for people to find the club and join
• Notify members of upcoming events
• Share photos from past events
• Pass on wisdom from experienced members to newbies
• Store training manuals

Phase 1 - Get the basics
Content

• Contact details - Need a senior club member to volunteer to receive emails from the Contact Us form I'm it :)
  
• Joining instructions
• Location Map (Google map)

Code & Theme

• Choose a theme from http://drupal.org/project/Themes (I'm no great theme designer)
• Get the colours right  Good enough for now
• Get a functional online web page editor (tweak the TinyMCE wysiwyg)
  
  1. Fix carriage returns. Currently pressing enter doesn't always work as it should.
  2. Find a way to insert pictures without leaving the text editor

Phase 2 - Build content
Content

• Gather all Red Raven digital content
• Upload articles, artwork, videos, and photos

Code & Theme

• Change the home page to show next meeting details, blurb about who we are and what we do, links to coming major events Ideally this would be done using the Panels module, but the Accordian module doesn't work with Panels. This is probably a jquery issue. Possible work around is to change themes and use Blocks instead of Panels
• Install panels module so that we can show latest photo, next meeting, latest video, coming events in a newspaper style page
  
• Create dynamic galleries so people can search by name, armour, weapon, and date
  
  1. Create galleries
  2. Create taxonomy (Not done - this would require hours of work to be worth doing)
     
  3. Create menu entries (Not done - this would require hours of work to be worth doing)
  4. Expose search filters (Not done - this would require hours of work to be worth doing)
• Create a dynamic event page that lists upcoming events and then archives them after the event is finished
• Create official Red Ravens email addresses such as liason@redravens.org and assign these to club officers who want them
  Check smtp server settings, I can use sendmail, or my own ISPs server, but haven't found the server name for redravens.org
• Setup web based email
• Give pages meaningful names so that they show up in search engines
• Setup menus and tool tips to help club members build this site
  

Phase 3 - Delegate & Promote
Content

• Open up the site so that club members can help with adding and editing of content
• Get our website linked from other medieval club sites. This will help us show up on the first page of google.
• ?Obtain other domain names such as redravens.org.nz?

Interesting ideas that aren't in the plan

• Allow club members to sell their used gear, or services through a shopping cart (Ubercart) module
• Have a chat box so people can chat online
• Have a message board
• Store videos of weapon drills
• Book reviews

Regards,
John