experience with joomla for alumni webpage

[martinschm]

hi,

i am thinking to set-up a alumni page for my old high school with joomla.
does anyone have experience setting up a alumni page and would like to share it?

what components did you use and what were the challenges that you had to overcome?

cheers
martin

[AJuOnLiNE]

I am working on one of this kind too for my high school maybe we can share thoughts together?
I am planning to use SMF for Forums like the Joomla Forum uses. I have seen a site on this forum that has some kinda statistics for type of Alumni in Members.. http://www.jamham.com
I think that is kinda usable..
I will look out on how to do that.. He used some form component or CB..
Cheers AJ
and Yeah.. Happy New YEAR!!

[Deffexor]

You can see the website that I set up for my local-area university alumni club here:  http://www.bostonorange.org

Basically, I'm using 2 third-party components so far (but would like to add more):

1) Newletter plug-in: ANJEL.

This allows me to have visitors sign-up using their Name and Email address without registering on the Joomla user system. (ie. no need for people to create accounts with passwords, etc.) Most casual alumni don't want to futz with that sort of stuff. They usually just want to get their feet wet before they dive in.

I've been thinking about switching to a more robust newsletter program though...

2) Gallery with integrated plug-in

This allows the club officers to upload images to the website so that people can download them later. It's pretty popular with the club members and also showing off what we do.

Things that I want to do:

*  Full-blown registration where we get all sorts of details about our alumni.
*  Integrate with whatever Newletter program we use.
*  Ability to take a yearly membership fee (shopping cart?). Ideally, this would:
1) Allow only paid members to buy special things (tickets to game, etc.)
2) Automatically remind them when their membership is about to expire
3) If it does expire, still allow them "registered" access to news, but not to shop (except to renew the membership)

I've started to look at Community Builder, but I'm having trouble finding good documentation on how everything works. I guess I'm just going to have to setup a test site one day and start fiddling.

If you guys know much about CB and how to integrate a shopping cart, that would be awesome.

[AJuOnLiNE]

I am also looking for something that could allow me to offer few things up for sale..
However for this site that I am talking the members are Paid ones only..
So noone can become a member unless he wants to buy a product on sale...
As for your stuff..
I think if we get together we can solve a lot of our common problems I will sit and customise this Alumni Registration too in the coming days..
As I also want that on the Alumni Site I am going to make..
I did use CB for a site http://www.powerofyouth.org
And it allowed me to add more details in the Member Profile/Registration Form..
There is a 3rd Party Component or module as for Subscriptions.. But I guess its commercial..
check the site extensions.joomla.org and you might get it if you can afford to pay for the charges if any..
I am sure.. there is something like this on that site..
Let me know if you find any free ones or even paid ones..

[martinschm]

hi,

thanks for your replies. It would be great if we could help each other out and give advice. I will have a look at your sites later.

for subscription membership have a look at this extension
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1367/Itemid,35/

as for the a shopping cart you could use virtuemart but it might be to complex for your purpose. if just paying members can buy something you could you the above extension and then a shopping cart extension and just make it accessible to members that have paid.

as for my projects (my old high school class and for my university programme) i will probably use CB. That will allow me to have a registration process with user approval (so no one who doesn't belong there can sign-up) and also allow users to update their address information and maybe additional information about where they are working right now or what they have done since graduation and their graduation year (just for the university site). CB allows to make list with filters and one could set up list for every graduation year.

I will also use a PMS extension so members can send each other messages through the webpage.

CB has two extension (Joggle and Geocoder) that allow to show the location of members on a Google map which might be a nice gimmick on the webpage. My first attempts to install them have however failed.

Someone mentioned BSQstats, I might use that too to show from what region visitors to the site are coming from.

Haven't started any of my sites yet, still trying things out and will probably wait for the hopefully soon to come release of Joomla 1.5

cu
Martin