[pmwiki-users] Meetup? Drupal?

[Stirling Westrup]

Yesterday I was at a local club meeting and some folks were talking
about setting up a CMS to manage a website for the club. It would have
the usual features of news and articles, but they were also hoping to
use it to replace meetup.com which they are currently using to inform
folks of venue and time changes (of which there have been many).

I'm not exactly sure how that would be done in PmWiki, but I suggested
that we use it anyway because

  a) I like it, and
  b) I figured it couldn't be too hard.

I'm thinking that a good solution would use something like FASTData so
that folks could register for the newsletter and/or meeting updates
(with double opt-in) and use PmCal or similar to display event dates on
the site. Like meetup we'd also want user profiles and RSVP feedback for
meeting attendance. There was also talk about using the site to manage a
discussion list. Does anyone have any suggestions about best ways of
doing all this?

Secondly, someone else suggested that we use Drupal instead, not because
of any particular familiarity with it (as far as I could tell) but
because its well known and has a large user base. I've never used it but
I've heard its hard to install and set-up and would like to hear the
opinions of anyone here who's used it. I'm not really interested in
trashing it, but I would like to have some (reasonably) objective pros
and cons to put forward before a decision is made.

I've agreed to put together a simple demonstration site to show how it
might work under PmWiki and I'm interested in any advice folks have.