[NGO] what NGOs need in a website [checklist]

[Paul Roeland]

I have a few more points to add...

background info: I work for a medium-sized NGO (Friends of the Earth
Netherlands, www.milieudefensie.nl) that has already switched to Plone,
but also volunteer for quite a few small NGO's as their tech-person.

* database-backed forms.
PloneFormMailer is easy to use to construct forms to mail somewhere, but
often we want to collect and process the information on a larger scale.
(E-petitions is a prominent example). MySQL is very handy for this, you
can export the data into almost anything (spreadsheets, etcetera). So an
easy way to construct forms that store the gathered information into a
database instead of mailing it would be a big plus.
The most obvious solution would be to enhance PloneFormMailer.

* easy handling of large binary files (blobs)
OK, this is probably not only NGO-specific. But the NGO's i work with have
surprising amounts of binary resources that they want to share with the
public and/or partners/affiliates/branches, like a high-resolution photo
archive, audio and video files, large collections of PDF's. This stresses
a default Zope quite a lot. All the elements to solve this are more or
less there (PloneMultimedia, ExternalStorage, Tramline/PloneTramline) but
they're not that easy to set up, and there are still hitches in mass
uploading, webdav and the like.

* pre-defined "site profiles"
again, maybe not NGO-specific... but it would speed up deploying a website
a lot if some sensible default profiles were given for workflow and the
like. As an example: creating a Plone instance as a "publishing site"
would disable random people from joining, and would have a workflow geared
towards just publishing information from a small group of authors to
anonymous.
On the other hand, a "community site" would behave more like the current
Plone default.

Paul Roeland