Forum OpenACS Q&A: Out-of-the-box, or new package?

We're planning to build an alumni portal for one of our clients, a secondary school. Here's a brief overview of the specs:

Personas

We want to support the following groups of people and their respecive goals:

1. School Administrator
   Goals
   • gather demographic info from alumni, and possibly identify outstanding alumni
   • spam alumni list re: donations, or alumni activities
2. Alumni
   Goals
   • keep abreast of school events and activities relevant to school alumni
   • keep in touch with old school friends

1. Allow school administrator to spam alumni list
2. Allow school administrator to maintain a calendar of alumni-related activities
3. Allow alumni to register online
4. Allow alumni to search alumni database
5. Allow alumni to keep in touch with each other through an online forum
6. Allow alumni to view calendar of activities

1. create a group named "alumni" and create a calendar for this group
2. give alumni members read-only access to the alumni calendar
3. give school admins admin rights to the calendar
4. create a registration page. This is a modified user registration page that collects additional info about alumni (i.e. college enrolled in/graduated, company, etc.) and automatically enrolls the new user into the alumni group
5. create an alumni report page, accessible only by school admins, that provides the following info:
   • total number of registered alumni
   • number of registered alumni, by batch
   • some other report, based on the alumni details collected in #4 above
   • provide a friendly interface to the spam module and allow school admins to spam alumni from here

I'm planning to put the UI, data model and supporting procs for #4 and #5 inside a new package ("alumni-portal"?). However, I have a strong hunch that:

• this is the 3.x-ish way of doing things and not the 4.x-way, and
• I can accomplish my goals with out-of-the-box OACS4.5 using acs-subsite and some other packages that I don't know of

What do you think? Should I build a new package, or RTFM?

PS. We need to deploy this immediately, which leaves out the upcoming dotLRN-Postgres as an option. Our client can't afford Oracle, so dotLRN-Oracle is also not an option.

I think you should re-consider using dotLRN. We have been using our current instantiation (SloanSpace) extensively to support alumni and plan to continue to build more functionality for that constituency. The dotLRN-Oracle version is nearly ready for prime time. We are planning to go live Aug. 1 - 15th time frame. What if we offered you a box and let you use our Oracle license for dev. work until the Posgres version is ready? My understanding is that dotLRN-Postgres is not far behind. Berklee is pushing aggressively with dotLRN-Postgres and have similar deadlines. In any case, let me know if there is any way we can help.

--Al Essa

Al,

Wow! Thanks for the generous offer. My problem is - the alumni system will be integrated with an already-deployed school intranet running on OACS 4.5. I'm not sure if it's wise to switch midstream (the schoolyear started last June 2002). I'll just probably do a quick hack - just enough to satisfy our deliverables, and I won't spend trying to build what dotLRN already has built-in. I'll also see if extra hardware is available, so that we can run the alumni system on a separate dotLRN-powered server.

dotLRN is clearly in our sights. We'll probably migrate them fully next school year.

Jun,

Why not an OACS EB? (For the non-Filipinos in the list, EB, or eyeball, is our equivalent term for 'social')

Radam