Creating a Website for your LoCo Team

The purpose of this page is to create a central resource for finding information related to creating a LoCo website.

Hosting space on Canonical servers is available to approved LoCos. To see how a LoCo is approved, see LoCoGettingApproved. There are limitations to what applications may be hosted on the Canonical servers.

Create Launchpad accounts

See the LoCoHosting page for the software available. To create the required accounts:

1. Follow the instructions under LoCoHosting 'How to get hosting space' and create the Launchpad account.

2. Create a team for the LoCo on Launchpad.

Request Website

Once the Launchpad and team accounts have been created, create a request on Launchpad for your website. Include the following information in the ticket:

• LoCo Wiki URL

• LoCo Mailing List URL

• LoCo Launchpad URL

• LoCo IRC channel

• LoCo Contact and their Launchpad account URL.

See the Kentucky request as an example.

Decide on Content

Decide what content will reside on the website and what will be on the wiki. Creating content on the wiki allows information to be centralized and can be found easily by rest of the Ubuntu community. See the Colorado Team's ColoradoTeam/EnhancedLoCoWeb for what features could exist on the LoCo website.

A good example of using both the wiki and a separate LoCo website is the Australia Team:

• Wiki-Page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AustralianTeam

• LoCo-Website: http://ubuntu.org.au/

Select a Website Platform

Since Canonical is providing widely used software for the website, there are many options like Drupal, Joomla!, MoinMoin, or WordPress.

Drupal Resources

• See the Ohio Team website as an example of the use of Drupal.

• See the EdubuntuSitePublishingTools for a discussion of the pro and cons of using Drupal.

• DrupalConcepts - Background information on how Drupal works.

• DrupalPaths - More background information on Drupal.

• DrupalHowtos - Information for creating multi-lingual sites, mailing list integration.

• DrupalModules - Useful add-ons.

Joomla Resources

• Help on installing and setting up Joomla!: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Joomla

MoinMoin Resources

• HelpOnInstalling - Installation instructions.

• Instructions on how to use MoinMoin: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MoinMoin.

Wordpress Resources

• Instruction to installing WordPress: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WordPress.

Django Resources

• LoCoDjango - using the python-based Django framework

Forums

Forums from the website should link to the LoCo forums on ubuntuforums.org, unless its a language not supported already or there is a good reason to have a separate one. PunBB, phpBB, XMB, Drupal (integrated into the Drupal platform), and SMF have been used and are free. The popular vBulletin requires the purchase of a license.

phpBB

• See the China Team forums as an example.

• Installation instructions for phpBB: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PhpBB2

punBB

• See the French Team forums as an example.

• Installation instructions for punBB: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PunBB

SMF

• See the Finnish Team forums as an example.

XMB

• See the Serbian Team forums as an example.

Templates

For templates to use with some of the mentioned CMS tools and forums, see LoCoTemplates.

Additional Add-ons

Planet Aggregator

Planet allows feeds of blog posts by the LoCo's members to be displayed on the LoCo website. See Planet Ubuntu as an example. To set up such a feed, see LoCoCreatingPlanet.

LoCoMap

Creating a map of locations of a LoCo's members can be an interesting addition to the website. Take a look at the French Team map. Instructions for creating a similar map are at LoCoCreatingMap.

Calendar

It is very helpful to set up an event calendar providing an ical based machine readable format as this enables your followers to include a list of upcoming events automatically in applications like Evolution, Mozilla Sunbird etc. This might increase the amount of visitors. An example is the Drupal Event module.

History

To see the history of hosting services provided for Ubuntu, visit FrDeHosting.

CategoryLoCoTeams