Okay, this discussion may be getting out of hand. But the platforms seem to be changing faster than we can think about them.

Other possibilities that have cropped up in the last week:

Bitweaver CMS. [Content Management System] Explained at the TriPUG meeting last week. The primary developer is local, but it still seems like a developer’s toolkit and so may be a chainsaw when we need a pocketknife.

CivicSpace is an integrated system that’s being used by various groups for grassroots organizing and civic activity (e.g. local party organizations, etc.). It’s based on Drupal (another CMS), but provides a framework that takes some of the chainsaw-ness out of the tool. I heard about it at the Chapel Hill BlogTogether teach-in.

Hosted systems at Traverse Global, a Michigan company that’s been providing hosting for BPW for awhile (e.g. BPWNC, BPW Brevard, BPW Outer Banks) and recently signed an agreement to offer free web sites to AAUW branches. [Yes, there are strings, but not many.] The templates they offer AAUW are Mambo based (another CMS), but the structure they put on top of it may make hide the “chain saw” nature of that tool. [It’s not clear that the same technology is being used by BPW - at least not all of them.]

Finally, another mailing list announced GroupServer as chosen by e-democracy.org. this is merger of an e-mail list and web forum. There’s a video at the e-democracy link. This is, however, based on Zope and Python, so needs a relatively special server (though still not expensive). [Mambo, Drupal and Bitweaver will run on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers which are pretty ubiquitous. Another Zope CMS that’s had good local press is Plone.]

Brian reports that this technology is worth investigating. Audio Activism » Gizmo makes good VOIP recordings for recording audio files.

I’ll put it on the list, but the Onebox.com toll-free line that translates voice mail to e-mail is probably easier for our community to understand.

Here’s another open source calendar: ExtCalendar 2. I tripped over it at the AAUW affinity partner web site demo. It looks as if the project is in transition.

[The demo is running on Mambo. That may be another technology to check out - open source CMS.]

Some WordPress blogs have a list of recent comments in the sidebar. Particularly when (as in bbvx.org/wp) there are comments on old posts, this may be helpful.

It appears there’s a Template Tag for recent posts (Codex is down, so I can’t find it right away) but to get the recent comments, something else is needed.

The Wiki has a recent comments hack.

There are also references to recent comments plugins - one, another one. Both of those can be installed by the WordPress Plugin Manager but that seems to be offline for now. The second plugin referenced describes a manual install that doesn’t seem too bad.

Figuring out more about plugins and such may get me to the blogtogether.com Chapel Hill Blog Teach In on the 23rd.

While looking for a date-picker control, I found CalendarXP.net that has both a popup calendar (what I was looking for) and a flat calendar (which may be what we need).

The Carolina chapter of the Society for Technical Communication has a meeting scheduled for 6:00 - 8:00 on Thursday, July 14 - Getting Started with RSS. I’m planning to be there and I really think both using a blog-like application for alerts, job postings, events, etc. and syndicating other content from www.ncwu.org is something we need to think about.

Is anyone else interested in attending?

So if we were going to use this and change the default WordPress theme, there are hundreds of choices out there that we could start with.

See the WordPress Theme Viewer for perhaps the largest collections. After checking out a few, here are some ones that I like -

Scattered - would probably lose most of the goodies in the right column, and the unordered list style needs work, but appealing

Grubby Slipcovers - drop downs for archive and categories. Colors work well.

Redbar - looks as if it might not be hard to switch to a separate color scheme.

Any others that folks think stand out?

Check this out for a series of classes on how technology is affecting life in nonprofits: N-TEN : N-TEN Webinar Series

After the experience of doing a (rather thin, but still) blog for the AAUW convention, I’m starting to get the point of “writing” a blog, but the “reading” part was still problematic.

While each blog can stand alone as a web site to visit, the whole point is that all these messages are “syndicated” in a standard way. Software is available that brings them all together into something like a customized newspaper, but I’d never been able to get that software to work correctly.
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An article on Brian Russell’s blog has a reference to a handout for a presentation by Marnie Webb’s presentation on about digital media - including links to intros on blogging and such.

[Note that I’ve added Brian’s blog, Audio Activism, to the “blogroll” to the right.]