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Anyone here know Wordpress?
#11
We use a Google Calendar, which is embedded in our WordPress site. (Now that it's summer, there's nothing on the calendar until I put in the next year's stuff, but you can check it out at Poinsettia Elementary School in Ventura CA. ) You can "Look for earlier events" on the calendar widget, or visit the calendar page at http://www.poinsettiapto.org/?page_id=17 . We use Stout Google Calendar to customize how it appears in the sidebar.

It's not an ideal way to manage a calendar and content, since it requires two different logins. But gCal works well, and we use Google Docs to manage all our pdfs anyways.

Only a handful of people can edit the official calendar, by design. But it's easy for readers to add events to their own gCal, or download the ics file, then import it into iCal or Entourage, and sync it to their smartphone. When you consider how many hours would otherwise be spent by parents, each manually adding every single holiday and early dismissal and furlough day to their calendars, it's probably one of the best features of our website.

I use the User Role Editor plugin to tweak the capabilities of our contributors. For example, I allow Authors to edit their own Published Pages, and then I named the PTO secretary as the Owner of the PTO Minutes & Agendas page. She can now edit that page directly -- but she can't edit any other page.

Unfortunately, there are some serious limitations to any CMS. And it's hard to know exactly what limits you'll bump up against until you actually put together a site, and then bang your head against the desk trying to figure out how to make it do what you want.
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#12
Nice site. I did see other WP calendar plug-ins that rely on google.
One thing I forgot to mention-- we do want people to be able to post events without registration/login.
That's a few levels down in the information quest though.
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#13
Joomla 1.6 now offers Access Control Lists (ACLs), which will allow you to have multiple contributors with differing permissions on different articles or categories.

A brief article about that:
http://www.yireo.com/tutorials/joomla/jo...ting-group

Joomla would need a plugin to do the social things you are looking for. A paid plugin is probably going to offer better reliability and support than the totally free ones. A couple well known social extensions:
http://www.jomsocial.com/
http://www.joomlapolis.com/

Agreed with Mavic about the trickiness regarding calendars. Same experience here - every calendar is a LITTLE different than what you want, and a calendar is a complex thing to try to make or hack on your own. That said, there are many calendar plugins for Joomla, including some that just display calendar info from another source, like a Google Calendar.

Here's a demo of a premium template designed for a social/community site.
It includes styling for social plugins Jom Social and Community Builder, and also demos a calendar modules that displays a Googel Calendar:
http://demo.rockettheme.com/feb11/

It is generally considered that Joomla has a more complex administration that some other CMSs, like WordPress. But you are talking about a pretty complex site, so...

I personally find Joomla administration to be friendlier than Drupal, but YMMV.
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#14
bik, that's good to hear about ACLs in 1.6. I have stopped using Joomla simply because end users have such a hard time with the admin. When they redesign that completely, I'll revisit it.

Have you tried Drupal 7? It's admin is much nicer than Joomla's (at least 1.5).
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#15
MAVIC, actually, I haven't tried Drupal 7. I'll check it out before I comment again.

Even back in older versions of Drupal, I might agree that the admin is/was "nicer" than Joomla. I can't explain it. It seemed like there was more purpose to it, but I just didn't "get" that purpose. In past versions, some people described Drupal as more of a developer's CMS and Joomla as more of a designer's. I'm more of a designer/content guy, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I will check out 7 though!
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#16
Wow, I'd think Joomla is 100% a dev's CMS. Drupal is somewhere in between and WordPress is largely a designer's CMS.
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#17
Straying further off topic...

MAVIC,
At this point, I'd say you're absolutely correct --
Wordpress is most friendly and popular with designers.
Joomla is very extensible and capable of very complex sites, but has a more convoluted back end.

The reputation I was referring to is, of course, outdated.
I was just mentioning how I came to be more familiar with Joomla rather than Drupal.

Back in the days of Joomla 1.0 and Drupal 4 or 5, Joomla was more friendly for templating, while Drupal was more friendly to developers who wanted to build their own extensions.

Things change fast!
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#18
Sometimes they change fast, and sometimes they don't Smile Seems like Joomla was stuck at 1.5 for a LONG time.
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