Like many full-time web developers, when I am not coding at work I am coding at home. Those projects are usually favors for friends or family who want to post photos or some other simple thing. The project I am going to describe doesn’t fall into that category.

Sometime in the mid 90s I put together my fraternity’s first site on Geocities. Ever since then, I have been attached to this site in one way or another. Sometimes I was the sole editor and developer, other times I just approved new users, and still others I just dealt with really light administrative work like setting up new email addresses.

The fraternity’s current leadership has decided that the site needs to be fully revamped from the ground up. It needs to communicate to the students on campus as well as keep the brothers (both undergraduate and alumni) in touch with each other. Their plans are ambitious, and they’ve asked me to helm the development of this site.

As I work through this project, I thought it might be interesting to share my experiences here.

So far, I have a very rough outline of the requirements. The site will be divided into three major sections:

1. Frontend - the part of the site that all visitors will see. This would include content like a guestbook, photo gallery, and mission statement.
2. Forum - a private forum for communication between fraternity members. For years this has been the primary method of communication between brothers who moved away from the New England area, and was recently subject to an attack.
3. Backend - another private area of the site that will function much like a knowledge base. A member directory and our constitution are examples of what would be stored there. Additionally, this is were site editors will be able to post content.

Given the short amount of time between now and the beginning of the school year, it is unlikely that all three parts will be completed. Once we have specific requirements of what each section does, we’ll need to determine which absolutely must be ready by September.

I have already chosen Drupal as the CMS. I’ve played with it a bit already, and I think it’ll meet the group’s needs easily.