HR Geeks

This morning, I launched a new version of the HR Geeks website.  I’m proud to say we now have the only non-hideous, non-1995 website of any geek group in Hampton Roads

The site is running WordPress, with a highly hacked up GridFocus theme.  After much debate, and a not-insignificant-delay, I determined that I didn’t have the free time or energy to maintain the site using a custom CMS, or even a pre-built ‘framework’ like Django.  The big scare over a ‘public’ CMS, like WP, is security issues.  Luckily for me, I use WP on a number of other blogs, so keeping track of upgrades and the like is fairly easy to do.

As part of the migration, we also dumped the old PHP Webcalendar system, and moved to a public Google Calendar for all event tracking.  PHP Webcal was a very non-elegant system to use, while Google Calendar provides a superset of the features, with nearly 0 effort on our part.  There is even the possibility that we could grant access to the public calendar for certain groups to modify their own dates.  I’m not sure how access controlled Gcal is  currently (I know you can have multiple editors, but is it free for all for them?), but it’s worth a look.  Having iCal support, now that I’m using OSX full time, is incredibly useful.  The HTML output is substantially prettier than any of the other PHP web calendar’s that I’ve seen so far.