Sandbox

I am working with a local University Alumni club to set up their membership site and was wondering if anybody could give me some suggestions on how to do the following in Joomla (total newbie so don't worry about hurting my feelings).

What I would like to do is have a main organization (university alumni association), that has individual chapters/clubs that can be grouped into regions.  New Members would then sign up for a specific club and pay dues to that club (not sure about belonging to mult clubs at once).  The ultimate goal would be for the clubs to control their own memberships and publish news that is important to them.  At the same time, they might want to make certain things available to the region (special events, parties, etc...)  The main group would need to be able to publish news that would be displayed on all of the club pages.    Because it is member driven, some topics would also be private (for instance you could track birthdays of members but that isn't something a non-member needs to see).

It seems like a similar structure could be done by defining the different clubs as members and allowing them to have their own home pages.  But that may not enforce the same kind of look and feel thru out the organization.  And i am not sure how you would limit individual home pages to a sub set of users.

I have not seen anything that would allow the regional aspect either.  but again... it is probably there and I am just not seeing how to do it.

A final item that I think would be pretty nice to see is a way to allow your members to choose what categories they would like to see news on.  For instance, in this alumni application, some people want to see it all and others only want to focus on fund-raising, academics, athletics or a specific sub-category of those.    Something like the My Yahoo setup where they could set flags to see just the topics/modules that they want would be very flexible.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions...

Les

I'm not sure how to do anything like that on a grand scale, but i can break it down a little bit for you.

The news - Se up a diffrent category for each group, then you can set up a blog tat will check that specific news item, and the "main" news.

The look - This is pretty easy, you can just go thru and assign a diffrent template to each group of pages.

As for some of the other stuff, I'm not really sure, that stuff would be a little bit more difficult.  Currently the 1.1.11 version does not support making your own access groups, which would make you plans alot easier.  I think it is part of 1.5, so if you can hold out a little while (beta on the 12th) then you might have better luck.  I hope i was at least a little helpful.

hello all (first time posting on here)

I am trying to do the same thing as instead of startign a new thread I may as well continue this one.

I need to set up a website that has "Regional chapters" of an organization.

Users need to be able to log on and receive PMs, Memos from the chapter leaders, they also need to be able to view other members in the chapters profiles in a list as well as a list of regional and national dates in a calender.

The super admin and lower selected admins (chapter presidents) would be able to add and delete users from a chapter.


Is this something I could do in joomle without getting to heavily in to coding or am I barking up the wrong tree and shoudl look for other CMS?

All the best & Thanks in advance

John