John Hogenmiller
Posted in General Discussion 5 years ago
I maintain the website for the Bedford County Amateur Radio Society. It's based on Wordpress and while it has a blog, it's mostly static as most of our activity takes place on a mailing list. I'd like to make the website more inviting for joining and posting content. People don't feel like writing pages, but they'll happily post pictures, links, and comments all day.
I'd like to hear experiences and recommendations from anyone else that has attempted this, and to see if OSSN is suitable for this. I had been working with Elgg
So here is what I'm looking for:
Another thing I want to do is create a members directory. Consider this a bonus fantasy feature. There will be site users, and there will be active club members. When a member joins our club, they fill out a paper form with their contact information. They can also opt-in to our mailing list, to share their information with club members, and to have us enroll them in "Western PA Ares", a regional group we work with. Up until last fall, we maintained this in a spreadsheet. Last fall, I setup CivicRM which is nicer, but still a bit awkward. Members would have to create an account in wordpress, login, and then navigate to CivicRM, find their name, and then they can update it. We give members permission to view contacts and export a list. I think in an Elgg or OSSN context, we could make a restricted "members" group and they could have a group profile with custom fields for their contact information and opt-ins. In Elgg, there's a plugin for custom group profiles, not sure about OSSN yet.
Rishi B
Replied 5 years ago
I personally highly prefer OSSN over Elgg. For its usability, features, customizability, and ease of installation.
There is a premium component for Events which would probably serve your needs (it's also included in the premium version of OSSN if you purchase that). You may have to write your own Calendar-like component or modify the Events component to get exactly the functionality you want, but most of it should be there.
Your existing pages should not be affected. So if you have a folder called "badges" in your web root already, www.yoursite.com/badges will continue to work just fine.
You can edit the landing page content through the admin dashboard, by editing the locale file, or by searching through the filesystem for the string you want to replace.
There is a free component that lists all members. You could maybe combine this with the User Categories component to get the functionality you want with a little bit of customization.
As for the last feature you described, there is a free Group Invitation component, but it would probably still require some customization to make it work exactly like you want.
Lastly, there are several people on this board who do (paid) custom modifications/components for OSSN. If you do get setup on OSSN and are looking for some kind of custom functionality, feel free to contact me if you like, email is in my profile.
Due to the many requests in the past for additonal features and components we have decided to develope a premium version. Features like Hashtags, Videos, Polls, Events, Stories, Link Preview, etc included in it.
$199 (Life Time)
