A few months ago, I joined the Toastmasters. Toastmasters is an international nonprofit organization that helps its members to train their public speaking skills (which is something I am rather bad at). The website boasts of over 10,000 "franchise" clubs with over 200,000 members, but of course you don't see much of that vastness at the local level. We just meet once a week, hold a few prepared speeches and shorter improvised ones, and that is pretty much it. It's great fun, though.
Unfortunately, Yours Truly suffers from the Curse of the Webmaster.
The curse of the webmaster is a dreadful disease, a variation on Tech-Supportitis. Like most of the expertise illnesses, it is easy to acquire and it will stay with you a lifetime. I had only lasted a few weeks at the Toastmasters club when the tell-tale smell of Web on me drew attention.
"You know, our website looks really shabby right now," the club president confided in me. "It could use some fixing, but what it really needs," (a sly look was in his eyes; the bait was being set), "is a ground-up redesign.
"I really wonder who could do this."
~ ~ ~
Now, naturally, I am going to use Drupal to do this, partly because it's what I know, but more obviously because it is the tool for the job.
The requirements are simple:
- Static informative pages.
- Event management with a calendar and locations
- Automatic generation of repeating events
- Events have "roles" to be filled, such as that of the moderator, the evaluator, the timer, etc.
- Sending email reminders for these meetings ahead of time, stating if roles are still vacant.
The simplest part is done. I've cloned the theme of the current site, so I can make the Drupal site look exactly like it. The next hard part will be hunting down an event management contrib module, and seeing if it's any good.
I'll keep you updated on how it goes. If I find myself writing substantial new code, perhaps some of it will find its way back to the community.
(Oh, and no, I'm not getting paid for it. I will probably score a good reference in my portfolio for Drupal-related services, though.)