I found a list of events that Abby’s going to participate in with her Girl Scout’s Brownie troop over the next couple of months. Apparently, Berta gets emails from their scout leader every so often with a list of updated events and notices. I think this is an effective way to keep in touch with the troupe, but I think there’s room for improvement technologically.
It might be nice to have a published calendar of events, along with a feed that parents could consume in Outlook, Google Calendar, or in my case, Lightning. I’ve discovered that meetup.com provides iCal feeds that make it easy to subscribe to events. Of course, there are my usual misgivings with meetup.com, particularly that it’s a paid service and that they retain control of the data so that you can’t move it elsewhere when you decide you can’t pay them anymore. So I think there should be a better, open solution.
That’s where I think Habari can step in. This isn’t meant to sound like an advertisement, because I really think there’s something here. First off, having a blog gives you a centralized location to publish event information (and results!), which is the important part. There is apparently already a plugin (yes, the Habari scene is now moving so fast that I can’t keep track of everything going on anymore) that will track events as a separate content type within Habari. So it should be easy to segregate a scheduled event from a news posting or a page of contact data. There are still a couple of important pieces missing.
The plugin, as far as I know, does not produce iCal feeds. That’s a dealbraker for me because one of the major problems I’m trying to solve is to be notified of when new scout events (and other kinds of meetup events) take place. But producing iCal output shouldn’t be too difficult if you’ve got a set of data with dates, right?
Another thing is that the site should be protected from unvalidated visits. We don’t want just anyone knowing when these events take place or having access to contact information, so it’s important that we lock that down. This might not be as important for other groups, but for the brownie troop, I think it’s warranted. Thankfully, Habari’s on the verge of having a complete (if not entirely finalized) ACL system that should allow exactly that.
I’ve been considering Drupal as an option for such sites. But the thing I’ve come to understand from working with it is that Drupal, while extraordinarily functional, is not something that a brownie troop leader can grab off the shelf and make go. Particularly for events and calendars, I think Habari - for something more than a blog, but less than a CMS that you’d pay someone to configure for you - is a better fit for people looking for a light, efficient, uncomplicated CMS.
Some might also suggest WordPress for such a purpose, and perhaps that would work, but what I’ve been noticing from how we’ve assembled the template system, and how plugins work, is that Habari has a way of integrating the extra features provided by plugins that makes it feel more intrinsic. In comparison, many plugins that offer these extra features in WordPress, while they might work well, seem like extra things that are hung off the main system when you’re using them and not things that are integral to the system on UI. I’m not sure how to quantify this exactly, but I think as we start to see Habari move toward the light CMS role, the differences in how well add-ons integrate into the system will become more apparent. Then again, I’m obviously a bit biased toward Habari.
I really don’t have a lot of hope for getting Abby’s brownie troop on Habari, or Meetup, or any web platform for that matter. But it’s these real-world ideas that help extend the offerings of software so that when websites for brownie troops becomes the norm, we’re positioned well. Until then, maybe Berta will produce an iCal feed for me somewhere.
