I'll jump on this wagon, too! Also, the dancing avatar idea is not that far out. I've thought - and even begun work a few times - on a way to notate dances so that I could play them as programs for X's and O's on a screen to test run dances that I've found or written. I guess that an avatar is just a little more graphic design for an X or an O! I might also store the dance notations in a DB and print them on cards (or iphones) afte translation into English (or French or Japanese) Chip Hedler remarked on 9/16/2011 12:51 PM:

Count me in on the web list, too. Martha, I've been pretty happy with Joomla, too. Beth -----Original Message----- From: callers-bounces(a)sharedweight.net [mailto:callers-bounces@sharedweight.net] On Behalf Of Martha Edwards Sent: Friday, September 16, 2011 4:08 PM To: Caller's discussion list Subject: Re: [Callers] contra dance webmasters unite! Chip - I've been using *Joomla *for our site here in St Louis ( http://childgrove.org) for about a year. For myself, it's the perfect blend of front-end ease-of-use for content updaters and back-end flexibility for the designer-techie who wants to make the site jump through a few hoops. I love it. I can do things I always needed to hire a programmer to do before - like make online registration forms that send you an email with the registration info AND send the registrant on to PayPal (thank you, Chronoforms!). However, since it looks as if, in the big Content Management Systems shakeout, there are three popular survivors, *WordPress, Joomla,* and * Drupal*, I've done some investigation into the other two as well. If the folks making the web site don't have a bunch of tech experience as a web designer or programmer, I'd probably recommend *WordPress*. It's a lot easier for non-techies to set up, and I've seen some spiffy sites done with it. On the other hand, I also hear it's a lot less flexible for web designer/programmers. In other words, if you want to do what IT wants you to do, it's GREAT, but if you want to do something slightly different, you may be out of luck. That makes sense, though. I figure you get extreme ease-of-use OR extreme flexibility, but not both. Don't know if you could do an online registration form with it, for example. Anyone have experience with this? I can't imagine a contra dance group ever needing something like *Drupal*, which (I hear) falls squarely in the techie (extreme flexibility) camp. But hey, if you've got someone who knows it, rumor has it that it can do amazing things. Uh-oh, just realized that we're not already on the contradance web-stuff discussion list. My apologies. So, in penance, and to keep the discussion about dance, I will include here a link to my cute little double grand square Flash movies<http://www.westendweb.com/doublegrandsquare/> . M E _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)sharedweight.net http://www.sharedweight.net/mailman/listinfo/callers