Council of Elrond

steffen will very soon start to create a new design for our homepage (he just told me today). so maybe we should gather some ideas, what we would like to have there.
while steffen is very capable of making a nice look, it´s still up to us to fill it with content.

for a start, here is the current menu:

Charter
Current members
Past Councils
Major Decisions
National Councils
International Tournaments
Projects
Useful Links

of course there has to be a link to this forum here.
then we need some place for the players directory.
also a homep for the newsletter/journal
anything else??

at least for the players directory visitors have to be registered to be able to have a look at it. or maybe the list of players is public, but you have to be registered to get access to the emailaddress of the players.

and last but not least: updates of many of the exisiting categories have to be made.

All sounds good.

atm, we have several members of the forum who don't really belong here. We should make them members of the public section, and not of the internal discussion forum, imo.

my idea is to create a little content management system where you can insert, update and delete contents by yourself. first of all, i need some information:

1) access
ftp/sftp serveraddress (i guess it is www.councilofelrond.org)
ftp/sftp username, password
mysql database address
mysql database username, password

is there a phpMyAdmin installed? if not, i can do this by myself if i have access to this server.
are there backups for the database?

2) wishlist
which functions are essential? which functions are "nice-to-have"?

i attached a proposal for a layout. i will use the smarty template system, so it will be very easy to change the layout and design. what i have in mind is following:

- small user login/logout system
- logged is users have admin status and/or moderator status
- admins can add, modify and delete users
- moderators can add, modify and delete articles
- there is the global player list
- moderators can add, modify and delete players (global player list)
- moderators can send emails (e.g. newsletters) to players (global player list)
- ...

if you have any ideas, feel free to post them.

I just sent Steffen the ftp and mysql info he asked for, so those questions should be taken care of. I'm not sure if I mentioned database backups in the PM I sent though, so I'll cover that here: I back up all files and databases on the server weekly.