Ok, so it's been a few weeks since my last post on the project, but I am going to continue with the User experience/front-facing portion of the application. This one, however, I want to leave open to the community how best to deal with this, if we put anything in the application at all. At the Philly CFUG site, we have two random pods for the sponsors, one local and one global. I have seen other sites just list them all. Is this something we should bother with? Is this something that should be "pod-like" so it can be added on through custom extensions of the main application? I want to any thoughts on this.

This post deals with all the other "items" that might be on a user group site. What I have been thinking is these items can be more like blog posting with categories. I think this would be allow for the greatest flexibility. So without further adu, here are the item requirements:

• An Item shall consist of the following items:
  • Title
  • Free text area used for descriptions/further information.
  • Activation flag
  • Link
  • File
  • Item Category
• Items shall be arranged on the User Group site by category
• Any member shall be able to submit an item using just their First Name, Last Name and email address in accordance with the Membership requirements
• All items submitted shall be inactive
• Administrators shall have the ability to activate and deactivate all items and shall be notified when new items arrive

Well, that pretty much sums about any of the extra things on a site (like Articles, Links, Jobs, etc.). Below are some more front-side requirements not specific to any of the requirements already listed:

• The User Group mission shall be displayed on the main page and be editable by Administrators through the administration interface
• The site shall have a contact form that will generate an email to the administrators (usually, one of which should be the user group manager)

Well, I guess the next step is to define the requirements for the Administration area. That blog post will come about shortly, I imagine and hopefully next week, the team can start down this path.

Ok, I'm on a bloggin role today. Previously posted were the requirements for Membership and Meetings. This time around, we are going to look at Presentations. Now, Presentations are usually associated with a meeting, however, they should be considerred there own stand-alone item:

• Presentations shall consist of:
  • Presenter
  • Title
  • Free form area used for further information about the presentation
  • Associated resource (File or Link)
• Administrators shall be able to create/edit Presentations
• Each presentation shall be allowed to add a File or a URL to it
• Administrators shall be able to associate a presentation to a Meeting
• An area within the User Group site shall exist for the listing of all presentations within the User Group

Pretty straightforward requirements and nothing real special excpet the last requirement reminds me that I did not include that in the Meetings one so I'll go back to that post to update it.

Ok, now that the holiday weekend is over, I guess I should get back to this project. BTW, if I haven't mentioned this before, our goal (myself, Nathan Mische, Vadim Chernets, and Mike Milnes) is to have this up and running version 1.0 by February 10th. Anyways, last time out I blogged about the requirements for membership in the User Group site. Membership was a natural place to start because without members, there is no user group. For the rest of the posts, we will focus on Meetings, Presentations, Other Categorized Items, and Administration. This post focuses on the Meeting item and its specifications:

• Meetings shall be comprised of:
  • Date
  • Time
  • Title
  • Free area for further details including location
• Only administrators should be able to edit and create new Meetings.
• The Meeting details area shall be edital through a Rich Text editor
• The next Meeting scheduled shall be prominently displayed in the common area of the layout of the user group site.
• Members shall be able to register for Meetings providing only their First Name, Last Name and email address according to the requirements of Members discussed in the last post.
• The administrators shall be able to view a report of who registered for the meeting
• The administrators shall be able to add/edit Presentations on a Meeting in which the display will show the presentation (further requirements for Presentations in the next blog post)
• EDIT: An area within the User Group site shall exist for the listing of all meetings conducted by the User Group

I orginally had a separate item for Location, but I think providing the administrator the flexibility to add that type of information to the free text area is easier on storage and maintainability of the site, which is our ultimate goal.