Open ideas: free website for organized geocaching.

[+simonduz]

I would like to offer a free service for Geocaching clubs and organizations in the very near future.

 

My offering will be a free hosted website for your organizations with either a hosted child domain name of your choice, or an fully qualified domain name alias that you have purchased (http://www.yourdomain.com).

 

Planned offering for each hosted website..

-Full administrative privileges for your website

-User registrations and privileges

-A full content management system including

• Easy Text/HTML (similar to using MS Word)
  
• Mapping with Google Maps API
  
• Calendar of events, with registrations, and scheduling
  
• Email capability for notifications, news letters, etc
  
• Cache repository (Undetermined content. I don't want to duplicate the great work done by Gecocaching.com)
  
• Blogs
  
• Forums
  
• Media gallery including images, flash, and video
  
• Links
  
• Documents
  

Of course privacy is of great importance so no information will be shared with anyone unless explicitly requested.

... more suggestions

 

Why would I do this?

Even though I am new to the sport, I have been lurking here for months to get prepared for my first geocache. Finally, for fathers day my wife surprised me with my very own GPS. Now I am hooked.

My thoughts were why not provide a useful service with as many features as possible to help bring together these groups that obviously love this sport of geocaching. Groups can connect and meet. Hosting events, and monthly meetings that can be broadcasted painlessly to all other groups would be beneficial. Many organizations evolving into one great community. Meet new people, and share knowledge.

 

So I throw the idea to you. I want to know your opinions. Are you interested? Do you have suggestions?

I will be on vacation next week doing some caching in the Western Caribbean. When I return, based on your feedback, I will either have the service online or pull the plug.

Thanks and have a great day.

[+Renegade Knight]

A lot of groups work on Yahoo lists and things like that.

 

If you make it easy to set up a website I think you have something.

[+simonduz]

It would be as easy as signing up for an email account.

Administration of a website would be easy for beginners, but still allow flexibility for those wishing to customize every part of their webspace. Administration of content can be done by one user or by a groups of users.

To start I would offer several templates. Each one slightly different in appearance and functionality. From there the administrator(s) can add or remove functionality as they see fit.

Examples:

(at anytime the administrator(s) can add, remove, and change permmision's of these features)

Website A features:

• News Articles
  
• Forums
  
• Calendar
  
• Links
  

Website B features:

• Calendar
  
• Links
  
• Wiki
  
• FAQ's
  

What makes this interesting is that each can look different but function the same for administrative and SEO purposes.

[+OEnavigators]

That would be fantastic! And thank you for offering to do this for the geocaching community.

I was looking into starting a local group for the few cachers around my neck of the woods to try to bring more people into the sport.

I looked at the Yahoo sites but it wasn't quite what I was looking for. Your offer seems perfect. I hope you go ahead with it.

[+simonduz]

Back from a much needed vacation. Much less caching than expected with the heat index well over 100 degrees F, but I did do a few virtual caches which I have yet to log.

 

Looks like there are a few positive comments so let's get this ball rolling.

I will start the implementation this evening. If anyone has suggestions please respond in this thread.

In the meantime does anyone know of any good free graphics and or icons related to GPS/Geocaching? Geocaching.com and Groundspeak are very descriptive with their terms of use so I don't think I will be "borrowing" any from these websites.

 

Thanks.

[+OEnavigators]

All Right!

 

Here's a link to some public domain geocaching logos:

 

Public Domain Goecaching Logos

 

Hope that helps

[+simonduz]

Just thought I would drop a quick note to let everyone know that this is still in the works. I am in discussions with a developer which has created an application that works with the framework I am using. This application IMHO is a must have and I have requested some additional features.

 

Some of the features it already supports:

Reads from and displays KML, GPX, and GEORss feeds. IP Geocoder, Driving Directions, Local Search, and much more.

 

That's all for now. Will post again when I have something y'all can finally use.

Thanks for the graphics! This will help.