My Home Owner's Association has a web site that's pretty sparse. I thought that I would take a bit of time to create a new site for them using Drupal, and increase my Drupal skills. There's nothing like throwing yourself into the fire to get out of the comfort of the frying pan, you know? So I was thinking about some features that I might like as a home member of the association, and how I might accomplish them with Drupal.
The first thing I'm going to want to do is get a theme that pleases by aesthetic sensibilities. It's not that the Drupal themes are ugly per se, but they all seem to offer the content in the same way - with the admin stuff exposed for anyone to see. I think that I want the full administrative side of the site to look different than the typical member-facing side. Rather than providing all of the functionality of Drupal the way Drupal does, I would like to select specifically what features appear on the site, and display them in an appealing fashion.
There are some features that I would like to offer. I think that a message board is important for our community. If people could post events to the board and others were subscribed to it, we could all be aware of things in the community that were of interest to us. Having a kind of "classified" section would be nice, too. People could sell items to other people in the community, and offer services, like babysitting. (Oh, that would be fantastic.) It would be extra interesting if you could subscribe to only those channels of interest that you wanted, so then I could eliminate from my feeds things like Historic Yellow Springs events, in which I have no interest.
It would be nice if we had a good event calendar. We could keep track of things like when construction is due and when the nearly-monthly lawn treatment is set to happen. There are some people in the development that take care of the plants around the entrances in the common areas. With a calendar, we would have an idea of when they are active so that other people could help.
Posting photos of events in the community could be useful, but I don't know of many things that have happened that would have photos. The one even on the existing site is for cleaning up part of the walking trail, an event that you wouldn't even have known was taking place if not for word of mouth. See? We need a calendar.
The site would need to have association information. This includes phone numbers for all of the companies with whom we have service contracts would be great - trash, recycling, sewage, landscape, snow removal, etc. Today I noticed that once again the mower people were laying around all day, with their parked trucks blocking a lane in the main through-way, then suddenly started mowing around 4:45pm before everyone started coming home. Not that I mind seeing topless Mexican men laying in the common areas with hats over their faces, but... No, wait, I do.
There should also be web-based forms for requests common in the association, for things like outside maintenance or requests for pools. The site could keep a record of the requests and the request documents, which could be uploaded as PDF or TIFF and referenced as-needed. But for common applications, a web form would be great - allowing more flexible use of property in a more timely manner. We're already using the site for board elections, so I think this is a natural step to take.
Minutes from the association board meetings could be published in a timely manner. It bugs me that I have to wait until the next meeting for the board to approve minutes from last month. Without attending the meetings, I have no way to know if I should act. What should happen is the minutes should be compiled by the secretary, then published to the web privately for the board to approve electronically. When the minutes are approved, which could be two days after the board meeting, the system would put them online for viewing by the association members.
It might be neat to have a map of the development in flash. Show the homes that have registered users in a different color. Let you measure distances on the walking trail.
There are a lot of good directions to take the site, and the existing site is pretty lackluster. I think it needs some love. I'll have to see what I can come up with.
Most of what you describe should be easily done with Drupal. Forums are supplied -- though not activated by default -- with the package download. Constructing specific navigation menus is easy with the Drupal Blocks and Menus tools.
You could easily publish minutes from Board meetings, but I don't think the Board can reasonably approve those minutes without a specific Board action. Most Board actions are generally delayed until a formal meeting, specifically so that that action can be recorded in the minutes. So the current meeting's minutes will reflect the approval of the previous meeting's minutes. It's an important aspect of record keeping and (ostensibly) transparency.
You should save yourself the trouble and have your HOA board sign up for eNeighbors. It has everything you mentioned plus a "groups" feature, and it has a full back-end admin side with reporting and emergency bulletin alerts.
Check it out: www.eNeighbors.com
Phil
eNeighbors looks neat, but we already have a site, we already maintain that site, there are documents there that are maintained by the company that the land developer put in place to manage the association, and there's an exorbitant monthly fee ($83/month?) for something that I can get for the price of cheap hosting (something that I get essentially for free when hosting this site).
drupal rocks, seriously need to get my head round it aswell.
I was in much the same boat as you.
I ended up using WP for the backend, but see no reason why drupal wouldn't work.
I've run into some issues regarding the forum package I picked to use. I went with a plugin which looks to be dead in the water. Were I to do it over again I'd used BBPress. That's my worry though, not yours... BBPress is made by the same group that's making WP so ongoing support shouldn't be an issue.
Just yesterday I started looking at the Google Maps API to see if I could get it to do something similar to what you were wanting to do with the Flash map.
Anyway... I'm rambling... The biggest issue I've faced hasn't had anything to do with the backend at all but with the community developers. They DON'T like (a better word would be hate), the forums and are constantly sending me requests to edit users comments. I've been able to maintain complete control of the site as they never paid the agreed upon contract for it. Nearly 2 years after completing the site they tried to, but at that point I was making ~$400 a month through ads and were appalled that I would request 18x earnings...
That's just something to think about... Who's going to actually "own" the site. You might think about learning from what I've gone through and decide that an "unofficial" site would work better for your needs. In the end you'll end up with a site which is much better able to suit your visitors needs, and local advertisers will LOVE you...
My current thinking is that I would just hand over whatever I build to the person/people that are running the current site, and let them maintain it. Certainly a drupal site with an actual back-end would make it very easy to maintain. At least, it would be easier to maintain than what they're doing now -- minor page changes and additions within a menagerie of frames and static pages. Eek.
Repeat after me: WP is not a CMS. :)
I can only imagine what the current site looks like. As you said the majority of them are for absolute crap.
You're also spot on if you're planning on handing it off to someone else for them to maintain for it to be as easy to use as possible. What I think you'll find though is that the more interactive you make the site the less likely it is that they'll want to use it... At least if your HOA is anything whatsoever like mine.
And I understand their rationale. They're goal is to provide a picture perfect happy face to the rest of the world. If there's even a chance that some disgruntled home owner might say something unflattering about the HOA, then it probably shouldn't be included.
This means forums are a no go... which in my mind is one of the PRIMARY reasons to have an HOA site.
I'd suggest if you decide to do this and then to hand it off to make sure you know exactly what it is that want and provide that... Nothing more. If you decide to keep it on the other hand, then that's money in the bank.
Finally... your snarky WP comment was not lost on me! WP is a CMS... A very stripped down one albeit but a CMS none the less. You use the tool which solves the problem. Originally the site I created was made with Geeklog with phpBB and Gallery2 integrated into the same database. Talk about HIGH powered!!! But it was overkill. (above said in jest as sarcasm is hard to convey in words! :) )
Our HOA uses the web site to vote for board members. I think they'd be open to some interactivity.
Our HOA site isn't maintained by the developer - it's maintained by its membership. I don't have an adversarial impression of my HOA. If there is an intention to keep the site clear of that, it shouldn't be a problem with required logins/authentication levels to see comments.
WP is not a CMS, it is blog software. It can be a nice starting platform for simple sites, but if you're trying to center your site around "content" (not "blog entries"), managing robust permissions, and maintaining high reliability for large community sites, that's not what WordPress seems targeted for.
Sounds like you would have some support behind you. which would be nice! Our subdivision isn't built out yet, the developers still hold 4 out of the 5 board seats. The division is 4 years old...
As you can probably guess, as resident's we're not real pleased. As a possible good turn of events we have we have a new management company. Nothing could be worse than who we had (I say that now...)
As to WP, it's all in how you approach it. Out of the box you're right in that it's very sparse. However, it doesn't matter what CMS you choose to go with, no one solution is going to meet all of your needs. That being the case, any CMS is going to have to be expanded upon. Menalto has built in integration with Gallery 2. BBPress does a pretty good job as a forum package (I'd like to see better ones though). That covers the majority of whats lacking out of the box.
In WP's defense since 1.5 the static pages feature has done a good job of separating blog entries from content. It also scales well to larger sites ala http://autoshows.ford.com/. With proper cacheing Slashdoting isn't that big of an issue either. You're entirelly right though in that permission levels are lacking. There are a few workarounds but none that are real great. So if User rights are paramount then I'd look at another package (ala Geeklog)
I'm not sure how many seats we residents actually have on the board. Seems like enough to make an impact, though.
Otherwise, these comments are funny. You guys know that I'm a contributing developer to WordPress, right?
Yes, I can slap a bunch of community-based plugins and hacks onto WordPress, and have it hook loosely with Gallery and bbPress, but I still wouldn't have the community features of Drupal, or the componentized customization (useful for people to customize a site without the skills to edit code) available via a CMS like Joomla.
Things might be taking a turn for the better as far as our HOA is concerned. Our management company was replaced with one which seems to be more on the ball and has expressed interest in giving the site I run some sort of official status. My hopes aren't high, but they've been sparked.
I look forward to the day that our community is built out.
Do you have a test site for your HOA up and running or is this still in the preliminary pondering stage? and just for my own benefit to see if there's anything I might want to incorporate would you mind giving the address to the current "sparse" site?
I'd forgotten your involvement in WP... (couldn't remember why the asymptomatic name rung familiar). But be that as it may I still stand by rationale. In my mind at least WP should be considered a full fledged CMS. In regards to Joomla, the commenting system is always in some sort of disrepair. And as to Drupal, it's been 2 years since I've done an install of it so can't say for sure but unless things have changed drastically in the way it operates customization was a bear. You've convinced me to give it a second look though.
Maybe that's the thing for me, WP just works. It does exactly what it says it'll do and has the extensibility to do things that weren't planned.
I have a test site for my HOA up and running, but it isn't available to the public (or the HOA) yet, since I'm still testing things out.
Indeed, you can probably still bring home a few 2x4s if, not planning for it, you stopped by the lumber yard with your 2-door convertible. But had you considered it beforehand, you might have taken the pickup instead.