[RULE] Call to arms and requirements for the website

[Marco Fioretti]

> Hi Marco,
> Looking at your requirements, all reasonable, I realize that my 
> suggestion of Drupal may be a bit heavy-weight. 

Well, if it's GPL, ie freely customizable, and can be easily set up
to do what we need, it doesn't really matter if we use only 20%
of its features. If I had had *previous* good knowledge of some
existing CMS engine I would have happily underused it, just to
save learning time. As it is, *I* frankly cannot afford to sort out
and set up a complex thing to use 1/10th of it,  but if it's already
in place, set up for RULE, OK.
> 
> 	Some questions (not just for you but also for anyone else):
> 
> 1)  What is the current website based upon?  Is it something you or 
> others have custom written, or is it based on a CMS of some sort?

A few custom written things.
            text written in ASCII format.
            uploaded
            custom script converts it to PHP page
            other script regenerates site map
            few and written PHP pages query MySQL database
            Said database updated by hand, separately, through
             PhpMyAdmin

Yes, terribly simple but rough, and doesn't scale at all, so I agree that we
need to replace it with something more efficient if we want the project to
grow and become more useful. The good side of the current solution is
that there is little enough material that converting it to anything else is a
surely doable chore.
 
> 2)  What sort of resources are available in terms of a server?  In other 
> words:
> 
> 3) Are we intent on Apache/PHP/MySQL and do we have the 
> (hardware/software) resources to support it, or is something more 
> "lightweight" possible or desirable?

I'll leave Rodolfo, who kindly hosts us on his server, answer on this. Personally,
it is simply that I have by now learned enough Apache/Perl/Php/MySql to be able
to make simple new things, or adapt existing ones. Hence, sticking to this tool kit
makes *my* effort minimal. On the other hand, if somebody, just as an example
come back tomorrow saying "there, an already working solution 100% fitting your
specs, but in, say XML + Ruby/Tcl/you name it", I'll just thank and study the new
stuff, no problem. Pending, of course, statements to the contrary from Rodolfo
about what is available.

The only change I'd like to add from this point of view is hosting the mailing list
on the same server, so I can administer everything together: one login, one
password,
etc... Not mandatory at all, though.

Ciao,
Marco Fioretti



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