Infrastructure

Specifics on operational things, like this website.

This Website (FGTC.org)

This section is dedicated to how this website is setup and used.

Platform

This website is built with Drupal. The main reasoning for this decision was that most of the founding members of FGTC are involved in working with and developing Drupal. It is also a fleixble, open-source content management system that fits the needs of this website.

Custom Code

At the moment, there is no custom code used on this site. If a custom theme is added or custom modules written, please describe them here so that future maintainers of this site will have knowledge upfront about customizations.

Development

The code for this site is stored in an SVN repository. If you have a username and password, you can check it out here:

Hosting

The FGTC website is currently hosted at DreamHost, on an account owned by bdunnette.

Roles and Permissions

At the moment there are the following roles. These probably need to be revisited.

  • developer: This role has all access
  • free geek volunteer
  • free geek staff
  • free geek admin

Network

Documentation for the FGTC internal network...

Tracking Software

Please note: at the moment these are just the opinions of Brian Dunnette, not those of the group as a whole!

Free Geek Twin Cities needs a place to keep track of internal data -- namely:

  • Volunteer info and hours worked
  • Donation information/receipts
  • Hardware inventory
  • Hardware sales (in the future...)

There are several ways this could be accomplished.

Separate Documents (a.k.a. The Status Quo)

Currently, we use Google Docs to store much of our information.

While this is flexible, and good for allowing work "off-site", it also ties us to Google (and their non-open-source software), and doesn't provide for good integration of our data.

Drupal

We already have a functional website -- and, since Drupal has an ERP module (http://drupal.org/project/erp), we could simply integrate this into the existing site.

Advantages include:

  • Members experienced with Drupal setup/maintenance
  • Ability to manage groups/security all in one place
  • Similar off-site availability to Google Docs

Possible down-sides:

  • What happens if our internet connection is erratic/unavailable? Since ERP is all on outside server, we'd be knocked off-line (though, in theory, this could be remedied by having some sort of internal Drupal server as well... though we then run into issues synchronizing the two, etc.)

ERP

We could also use a specialized Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software package -- there are several open-source options, including OpenERP (http://openerp.com) and its more community-oriented/modular off-shoot Tryton (http://tryton.org).

Advantages:

  • Could be more responsive (connecting to local server vs. over internet)
  • Maybe more secure (since data's not being sent off-site)
  • Better reports/receipts? (use e.g. OpenOffice, rather than printing web pages and/or PDFs)
  • Better data models (for taxes, etc. -- though Drupal ERP may be similar?)

Disadvantages:

  • Need to set up and maintain server (though many options can start out with client and server on same machine, e.g. Tryton's "Neso" package)
  • Less integrated than all-Drupal option(s), though we could create scripts to e.g. report number of machines earned, pounds recycled, etc.