Project: Chapter pages

[lilliealbert]

Talking with folks about using Bridge Troll, it seems like a common theme that would be missed from using Meetup is having their own place on the web. It'd be great to figure out how to give each chapter their own place at railsbridge.org — we're in the process of adding chapters to Bridge Troll itself, so the dynamic content could still come from there, but individual pages about each chapter would be pretty damn cool.

I'm picturing something like railsbridge.org/colorado, or railsbridge.org/sf, or railsbridge.org/seattle

@careful-with-that-axe, what do you think?

[careful-with-that-axe-zz]

I would be absolutely all about that and think it is a great idea. :) Let me know if there is anything I can do to help during the bridgetroll stage, otherwise I am all down to set it up on our side to snag the content from there when it is ready. ps Orange cats! Too cute.

[siruguri]

This came up in a discussion I was having with @lilliealbert - I had a question about where we can highlight ways for East Bay chapter attendees to get in touch with each other, and the idea was that it could be on a chapter page for EB. But we don't have chapter pages, so maybe we can have them!

Here are some thoughts on how this might be architected, given we already have /about/chapters, for further discussion:

1. Chapters are defined in a DB table, keyed to a "chapter name," and part of a 2-level hierarchy (country + chapter)
2. The names or potentially "long" versions are shown on /about/chapters, and are hyperlinked to chapter pages that look like /about/chapters/:chapter_name
3. The content on /about/chapters/:chapter_name is provided as Markdown in the database (edits are made via pull requests into code, to avoid having to design a CMS interface?)

[lilliealbert]

I like the idea of long routes + convenience routes. (/sf redirects to /about/chapters/sf, for example.) I think right now the chapter names are unique enough that we wouldn't need to consider country unless we wanted to for some reason.

I'm not sure about starting off defining the chapters in the DB. It think it might make more sense to hard code them initially, and if we see a lot of adoption and the routes file starts getting super terrible, refactoring it into something dynamic. I think we could find volunteers to help any less technical chapter leaders to create pages for them, and avoid creating any kind of CMS as long as physically possible.

It would be fun to create an additional API in Bridge Troll (or filter upcoming workshops on the RailsBridge.org side) so that an individual chapter could list just their upcoming workshops on their page.