Gslounge.com

Common observations from students about gslounge.com:

• Stale
• Obfuscated
• Irrelevant

Students want to share content. The site makes that super tough. The result is that gslounge.com has become irrelevant: after an early spike of interest at the beginning of both semesters, people stopped visiting because new content either isn't posted or because it is impossible to find.

Is the software on gslounge.com making our lives easier? No. Presently gslounge.com is running a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla. I am looking at Joomla and competitors like Drupal to see how we can improve the ease of use of gslounge.com. I am going to compare and contrast what these systems could offer us. In the days ahead I'll publish a point by point comparison of leading content management solutions.

I am not wedded to content management per se. Could we get away with simply using Blogger, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Groups, Google Docs and YouTube? Perhaps. In recent days the election involved thousands of visits to a student blog hosted by Blogger with videos hosted on YouTube - clearly the model works. Blogger allows us to host blogs on gslounge.com itself. We could instantly harness that basic blogging feature within our site for anyone who'd like to participate.

There is more to gslounge.com than blogging though. What about integration? (ex. telling the main page that the social chair just posted a cool interview with a student) What about the different uses the site will be put to? (ex. Programmers using webforms to inform Communications about events). I need to understand how we can mix and match these technologies to provide what we need.

In conclusion, gslounge.com is broken. Students don't use it and therefore it must be fixed. Investigating the technologies mentioned above and continuing to hear your great ideas will help us understand where we need to take the site.

Thanks,

Brody