I wanted to share news: we have now launched the new online community website for the African Democracy Forum at http://www.africandemocracyforum.org.
All members of a yahoogroup were imported to SMF. Those that we had organizational info for were imported to Joomla, and assigned as owners of profiles created using the Joomla bookmarks component. The yahoogroup was replicated using a mailman mailing list that opens in a joomla wrapper. I did a mailmerge to mail out an announcement to members including their new username and password, and now people are starting to log in and poke around.
They are empowered to add news, web links, calendar events, discussion topics, and add/update their organizational profile, along with all the other powerful SMF functions. The mailman-in-a-wrapper is a compromise. Our next step is to integrate the mailman list with SMF, so that new members can opt to join the mailing list via an integrated interface and all posts (whether sent via the list or via SMF) are posted in SMF.
Best wishes, and many thanks to you all for making all this possible. I can't wait to show it off at the World Movement for Democracy Fourth Assembly taking place next week in Istanbul! :-)
Tobias
