Or if there's a relevant degree course at your place, it would be worth asking if any of the students want to do it for work experience or as part of their course.
With subscriptions, you will need a non-trivial user account system. The database of publications will require some basic database and web server skills.
Nothing is particularly complex, but there will be lots of hidden gotchas and i:s to dot.
A quick discussion with durham_rambler suggests that WordPress software would probably support all of these things, and that hosting their software on your own web space gives you more flexibility that using the WordPress site. Other CMS software would probably serve as well, but WordPress is the one we use - and it's pretty popular, so you've a better chance that people will be familiar with the interface when it comes to doing updates.
As always, the difficult bit is not the technical side, but organising the material / organising people to provide their material...
Happy to discuss this further if that can be arranged - or by e-mail.
CSfG uses WordPress. The only one of those functions it doesn't use (unless I've just not been looking at that section of the site) is the payment. The only trouble I can see is that since they stopped doing bibliography centrally (I was the manager of bibliography prior to WordPress), it hs stopped being up to date. No-one asks us for publications anymore and we don't remember to provide them. This is more structure of site management, though, than structure of site itself.
There are Paypal plugins to handle payments for Wordpress, which are just a question of getting a PP merchant account and putting the plugin into your wordpress template.
Wordpress can indeed do everything listed, with the exception being the paid subscriptions thingie. Is that supposed to be a donation model where people can "subscribe" to already available material, or do you want to make material only available to subscribers?
In the latter case, depending on how big the site is supposed to get, having somebody be the web wrangler/admin would be required.
With wordpress you can select to have a static page as your frontpage, with a blog linked from it and as many other pages as you want. It has a built in user system and is fairly easy for non-technical people to get to grips with, without having to code wrangle.
But I would still recommend you get somebody in to do all the scut work for you, to keep the sites framework updated and cruft free.
ditto what they saidjorhettMarch 12 2014, 00:16:13 UTC
If someone competent sets up your Wordpress, people who are less technical and more content-oriented can easily maintain the site with perhaps an occasional query to the tech geek.
Why do I know this? Because I've done this for about two dozen sites, including several convention sites, and their impact on my time is so negligible (<1/2hr month) that I don't even submit my time for payment from the ones which pay me.
No other CMS is that easy to use. Drupal is a contract programmer's dream, and a content person's nightmare :( In general once you get away from Wordpress you're going to need significant geek talent on hand.
Besides yes, you need a couple of pet geeks, you also need some design talent. There are myriad page layout "templates" out there, so something suitable may be readily available, but give the left-brain stuff to someone left-brained, and the right-brain stuff to someone right-brained. And yes, I'd start with your campus directory.
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Or if there's a relevant degree course at your place, it would be worth asking if any of the students want to do it for work experience or as part of their course.
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With subscriptions, you will need a non-trivial user account system. The database of publications will require some basic database and web server skills.
Nothing is particularly complex, but there will be lots of hidden gotchas and i:s to dot.
Reply
As always, the difficult bit is not the technical side, but organising the material / organising people to provide their material...
Happy to discuss this further if that can be arranged - or by e-mail.
Reply
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In the latter case, depending on how big the site is supposed to get, having somebody be the web wrangler/admin would be required.
With wordpress you can select to have a static page as your frontpage, with a blog linked from it and as many other pages as you want. It has a built in user system and is fairly easy for non-technical people to get to grips with, without having to code wrangle.
But I would still recommend you get somebody in to do all the scut work for you, to keep the sites framework updated and cruft free.
Reply
Why do I know this? Because I've done this for about two dozen sites, including several convention sites, and their impact on my time is so negligible (<1/2hr month) that I don't even submit my time for payment from the ones which pay me.
No other CMS is that easy to use. Drupal is a contract programmer's dream, and a content person's nightmare :( In general once you get away from Wordpress you're going to need significant geek talent on hand.
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And yes, I'd start with your campus directory.
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