The Internet design tasks for a number of the ideas suggested for the Australian Social Innovation Camp are very similar. They are also very similar to the task of designing a real estate website of the type where the public are able to add listings such as occurs in some holiday rental properties and similar. Ideas that are in this category include the following:

2 Bob's Worth
Fancy a match?
Can I borrow a....
Develop a car pooling database package for local councils
Work experience for the disadvantaged
Work Placements Directory
Community toolshed online
Digs for the disadvantaged

I'll start with implementation ideas that are very specific to the task, allowing the task to be easily implemented without needing specialist skills or programmers, and then progress to those that give a lot more flexibility but need more skills to implement.

A) Direct use of Open-Realty.

An Open Source program that has been specifically designed for this type of task is Open-Realty. This is available for free. It is heavily used, well maintained, has good documentation and has an active group of supporters, maintainers and general helpers. It is unfortunate that the name makes it look as if it is only good for real estate websites. It has been used on a wide range of websites such as job listings and boat hire. It has even been used for Escort Services.

A particular advantage of Open-Realty is the ease at which non programmer can install and customise it to their own application. It has a simple administration interface that allows the administrator to specify all the fields etc., including the fields for the searches, as well as significant facilities to setup the look and feel.

Regardless of these abilities, I would still recommend trying to include at least one PHP/MySQL programmer and at least one digital artist/graphic designer on each team. I haven't used the latest version of Open-Realty but in using the previous versions I found that the setup of the Look and Feel for the site was best done by some PHP modifications of the template code. Further, the current version allows you to create general web pages and then add PHP code to get them to do advanced functions.

Open Realty has an add-on system similar to most Content Management Systems. If there were changes needed to allow better support of these typical community type projects, then this may be done as an Add-on that other community projects can then also use.

It also has a sophisticated Template System. While there are many free templates that can be downloaded, most are made for real estate, so creating some Templates suitable for community social innovation could be very good for helping similar community projects.

If anybody wishes to try this then contact me and I will set up a new installation for you to play with. To contact me, click on my photo and then click on the 'Contact' link above the photo in the 'View/edit my profile' page.

B) Combination of Open Realty and a CMS.

In order to get more flexibility and more features, Open Realty can be combined with an Open Source Content Management System (CMS). At the moment, the main CMS that has an up-to-date stable implementation is Joomla. There seems to have been several combination implementations but the main one seems to be CMSRealty.

This appears to be heavily used and well maintained. It has its own support group but the original CMSRealty creators provide relatively little help to most non paying implementors so if there are implementation problems you have to hope for support from other users.

Joomla is easy to setup but if you use this option it would be far better to have someone with some Joomla experience.

C) Just use a Content Management System along with it's Add on Modules.

If I wanted a more flexible system than the above I would implement everything in the Drupal CMS. Drupal has an excellent range of modules to create various types of community sites but I will only mention those needed to implement searchable listing sites similar to the ideas listed above.

The power of Drupal comes not so much as the power of the Drupal Core but from the versatility and flexibility of its modules. The two most important modules and the ones that would be central to the implementation would be CCK and Views. CCK will implement all the data fields along with web pages that allow the users to add the data. Views give the users facilities to view the data and to create reports.

While Drupal offers a range of search methods, I would be looking at the Drupal Faceted Search module. This has the potential to offer searches that are far more versatile that those generally seen in Real Estate web sites and similar.

The faceted search is very server intensive but I don't see any of the above applications as being high throughput. If any application was likely to end up being high throughput then an alternative would be Apache Solr Search Integration.

By the time you implement the above modules plus the modules they use plus other general purpose modules for creating community sites, you will probably end up with over 20 modules being added to the base configuration. All of these need to be understood, installed and configured and there may be some need for an extra module or modules that will have to be developed to complete all the facilities that you want.

Although it is very easy to create a simple Drupal Website, creating this type of website is a lot harder than one with lots of straight content. Learning how to use Drupal to create this type of website ends up being a steep learning curve. Even for someone like myself who has made a large number of Drupal websites, the use of Drupal for this application will be a far larger effort than the two previously mentioned methods. Regardless of this, it may be worth it in order to gain the flexibility that Drupal can offer. That is why there is a significant number of real estate and similar websites created with Drupal.

For anybody who has hosting that includes Fantastico (as with most cpanel hosting) you can do an auto install of Open-Realty or Joomla or Drupal. This is a great method of trying them out, particularly for trying out Open-Realty. Just don't use Fantastico for the final implementation. Doing so will later cause all sorts of problems with maintenance and security updates etc.

Other comments on better implementation methods are always welcome.