Advice on "members-only" site/sub-site in CMSMS?

[emgaron]

I'm looking for some advice/ideas/insight on the following (longish, but I want to give sufficient background):

I'm responsible for the website of the choir I'm singing in. This site is currently split into two subdomains, one for the main, public site and one for the "members-only" part. The public site was up until now maintained by my co-webmaster using Dreamweaver. However, as she has left the choir, I decided to move that part of the site to CMSMS (something I wanted to do for quite some time, but this was the final push... ). That move is almost finished and I have a working site running on a test server. I expect it to go live within the next few weeks[0].

The members-only site is at this moment based on custom-written PHP scripts, developed mainly by a friend of mine with some extensions by myself. While it is working ok for what it does right now, expanding and maintaining the code becomes increasingly tedious, especially, as I do not deal with it very often. Hence, I am toying with the idea to move the members-only site to CMSMS as well. The desired functionality so far is:

• Access only for registered members + corresponding user administration - I'd expect the FEU modules should be the ticket to handle that part
• Access to music scores/MIDI files/sample MP3s - that should be covered by a suitable "catalog" CMSMS module, I suppose. Suggestions welcome...
• Latest internal news - that's already built-in
• Agenda - most likely covered by a suitable Calendar module?
• At some point a full archive/list of all scores we have - I've seen this mentioned in the forum somewhere, including some suggestions, so that should be covered, too

The main catch I see is the wish to couple some of the "internal" data with the public site. One idea is to have one agenda on the members-only site where all events are listed, but to be able to mark some of them as "public", so they will be visible in the public agenda as well. That makes maintenance and delegation easier. Another wish is to couple the list of our music scores in some way with the public site as well (as a "repertoire" list).

Hence, I'm wondering a) whether that can be accomplished and possibly with which modules and b) whether these wishes mean that I have to integrate the "members-only" part into the main domain rather than having an altogether separate members-only site as we have now. They are in any case hosted on the same server, so in theory, data exchange between them is possible even if they are in separate sub-domains - and I'm not (too...) afraid of adding some custom code myself in the form of UDT or even modules (I'd rather not touch core...) if necessary.
On the other hand, I might be missing some advantages/disadvantages of integrating, so if anybody out there has some insight to share on a set-up like this, I'd be most grateful.

Thanks in advance for all suggestions/info/....,

Thomas


[0] for the curious: http://www.erasmuskamerkoor.nl/ - at the time of writing this still in its non-CMSMS state

[uniqu3]

For Members Part you are right and on right track with FEU Module
For Files i think you could easily handle that with Uploads Module (http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/uploads)
Any kind of listing can be handled with ListItExtended Module (http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/listit2)
For Agenda you could use CGCalendar Module (http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/cgcalendar) but if you do not need full calendar but only list of "events" then you could as well use News, CGBlog or ListItExtended, all of these have capability of Timecontrol, means setting publish and expiration dates.

Moving Members site to main is a personal preference, on one hand having it all in one makes it easier to maintain modules, collect information and split to "public" and "private" and on the other hand you might want to keep overhead of "public" site as low as possible, keeping it clean then as said, it's personal preference what works for you best.

To publish stuff from "private" to "public" you could also create various feeds from varuious modules with CGFeedmaker and display information from these Feeds on Public site with RSS2HTML or XMLMadeSimple Modules.

[emgaron]

(Sorry - bit slow in responding... )

Thanks for the suggestions - that might well prove helpful! I think I'll start off with a separate test site for the members-only site so I can play with the modules and then figure out whether it is sufficiently easy to make the two sites communicate (thanks for the tips there as well!). My gut feeling wants to keep both sites separate - just feels cleaner that way...