Public Website

note:

If any of the kids would like to learn how to do web development, we could install a content management system like wordpress and do it properly. We can pay someone via freelancer.com (many parts of the world will do stuff for cheap), and use bitbucket.com as a repository.

You would learn how web developers do what they do and how they get work. All by doing it... the best way to learn. How much? 100 euros would get a lot done, we'd learn from the freelancer, and get our own website for a lot less than usual. Doing it this way would be far cheaper than a course, and tailor-made for the student.

A publicly accessible website would be useful so that people considering homeschooling but who don't know anyone doing it can find us and make contact, and see all the cool stuff we're doing. The more homeschoolers we have the more we can do!

So far it looks like we would need:

    • A way to list all the activities, distinguishing between what is actually happening and what are ideas under development.
    • A way for people interested in an activity to contact the person or people organising it. We could use @corkhomeschoolers.org addresses for those who want to maintain privacy, and a webform instead of showing the actual address, to keep away the spambots.
    • A way to make discussion of the website, activities, ideas and anything else easy. A forum integrated with the rest of the site could do this.
    • Groups, associated with the different activities etc.

These kinds of facilities exist to a certain extent in the 'free' services offered by Google, Facebook etc., but aren't configured specifically for our needs and have really bad attitudes to privacy.

It seems like wordpress with the buddypress plug-in would be ideal for this, but my skills are limited and we would need some help form someone familiar with wordpress, jscript, php and so on. Until then we have this wiki, facebook and the mailing lists. That's not a bad start. Imagine if we had the pages set out in the same structure as this wiki, but each page (we want to) has a forum attached for further discussion, and a contact form for the organiser. You can click to join a group and be kept informed of any changes without having to keep an eye on the whole site.

That'll do for now, just making some notes so I know what to do and what to choose when it becomes possible.