Neighborhood "portal" or tiny ISP-type web app

[Jim Herrmann]

For my homeschool group, LEARN at kclearn.org, I use webcalendar, 
http://webcalendar.sourceforge.net/, as the basis for user signons.  It 
has the user account management already there.  It is written in PHP and 
uses MySQL, so it's not hard to customize.  You can tie into the 
database tables it uses with other custom scripts.  I setup a common 
calendar that the whole group has layered onto their own calendar.  This 
allows them to create and share their own events, as well as see the 
events for the whole group.  Works pretty good for us, you might 
consider it.

My $.02,
Jim Herrmann

Charles Steinkuehler wrote:

> I am interested in setting up a small website for my neighborhood 
> (Potwin Place, a late 1800's Victorian neighborhood in Topeka).
>
> In addition to some static content (history, house pictures, etc.), 
> I'd really like to be able to support a few "advanced" features:
>
> - User accounts:  This would only be for neighborhood 
> residents...manual account creation is OK, but it would be nice if 
> users could reset passwords and such themselves.
>
> - Authorized downloads:  I maintain the directory, and would like to 
> put PDF's online for download, but they should not be publically 
> accessible.
>
> - Runs on "typical" web-server:  I can setup pretty much anything on 
> my own servers, but if for some reason I leave the neighborhood, I'd 
> like something that would be pretty easy to setup on a typical 
> web-hosting account.
>
> Bonus features:
> - E-mail forwarding:  I'd like to let folks be able to create 
> user at potwin.org e-mail accounts.  All mail to one of these accounts 
> would be forwarded to a "real" e-mail account (ie: I don't need web 
> based e-mail access or anything, just the ability to manage a 
> forwarding address).
>
> - User can modify their own contact information (phone # & e-mail 
> addresses).  Did I mention I maintin the neighborhood directory? :)
>
> I know I'll probabaly have to code some stuff myself to get exactly 
> the features I want, but I'd really like to leverage an existing web 
> application (especially for the user accounts & authentication stuff), 
> and I figure there have to be tons of this sort of thing out there 
> already.
>
> Any suggestions for something that might work well for this kind of 
> application?
>
> I'd probably prefer an apache/php/mysql type of solution since that's 
> what I'm most familiar with (and unlike perl, php doesn't look like 
> jibberish to me), but am open to anything, even if it means buying 
> some new O'Reilly books on perl. :)
>