I just spent two hours trying to get CommunityServer installed from source, and it was a fairly painful and not-overly-intuitive experience. So I of course gave up before I broke my keyboard. Really, all I wanted from CS was the forums system and membership management functions, but my level of patience seems to be down on the norm so I'm just going to have to write my own.

In fact, this is better news than it sounds. CS is far too complex and unnecessarily heavy-weight for my purposes when all I want is a simple, easy to use and more importantly easy to configure message board system.

The project I decided to spend my hobby-coding time on for the next couple of months is of the same ilk as Project Hurricane. The idea behind PH was to have a light-weight, flexible and easy to setup portal for student communities and societies at University and college. Whilst it by no means failed to achieve those aims, more could be done. So, and named as an homage to PH, I too will be making a student portal system tentatively titled 'Tornado'.

Tornado will take the idea of PH Communities, a project that saw hosted PH sites with a much easier setup, but reduce it from being centrally hosted to being hosted on a per-university basis. A university would set up a Tornado server, which would act as an administrative hub for all of the Tornado sites hosted upon it. Societies and interested groups at that university would come along and request to set up a new site, which would be approved by the administrators. Setting up the community will be simple, probably wizard-based. The whole shebang will be as light-weight as possible and expose a plug-in API for developing new components.

It's a lofty goal, and one that I'm not certain I can adequately complete, but I'll give it a damned good go. It'll be my first adventure using VS.NET 2005 as well, Luke managed to convince me that ASP.NET 2.0 was going to make my experience a lot more endurable.

So at the minute what I need is feedback on what kinds of things a society site needs. I've a list of the basics, and I'll be investigating societies in Ed at least to see what they have to say. So, I ask you, any ideas?