Hi all,

I'm looking for suggestions about open source solutions that can meet a specific set of needs.

I manage a website for a small specialty college. We already use several open source solutions for various functions, such as osCommerce shopping cart, Coppermine Photo Gallery, phpBB forum and WordPress for blogging. All of these different applications are integrated into the site and work seamlessly in terms of navigation and appearance.

What the college wants to do next, is to create a system for graduates of their programs. This system would have (at least) the following features.

Public Functionality:

• Public Directory (so visitors can hire a graduate) searchable by name, location, employment availability
• Google Map showing the location of all graduates and linked to the graduate's public listing in the directory
• Ability to send messages to graduates if graduate has enabled it (see privacy below)

Graduate Functionality:

• Login and create/update their info, such as:
  • Name
  • Location (city, country)
  • Date and type of program they graduated
  • Type of degree or certificate held
  • Gender
  • Employment Availability
  • Willingness to travel
  • Photo(s)
  • Website
  • Contact info (could include social networking info such as facebook, myspace, msn, et cetera)
  • Postal Address
  • Biography
  • Work History
• Choose which information is public or private (should ideally have degrees of privacy ranging from available to administrators only or also to other graduates and/or registered employers and should include the ability to pick and choose which items are private and which are public and whether to accept messages from other graduates or the public)
• Ability to browse and search graduate directory and see the non-public info that other graduates have opted to make available for graduate viewers.
• Ability to send private messages between graduates and/or administrators.

Administrative Functionality:

• Only administrators can create accounts
• Ability to create graduate accounts and guest accounts (for select employers)
• Ability to mass-email (or selectively email) graduates.
• Ability to edit, suspend or delete accounts and their info.

So, what we're looking for are suggestions about the best open source candidate that can ideally perform all these functions out of the box, or at the very least, would be best suited to invest the time and resources into modifying.

If the best candidate turns out to be a full CMS (such as Drupal or Joomla) then I want to make it clear that we don't foresee converting the entire site to the CMS, even if the CMS has that capacity. At this point, the college simply wants to create this graduate functionality and to make it "play nicely" with all of the other open source applications for the entire site. So, please don't waste your energy telling me that we should convert the whole site. It may happen some day in the future, but for now we're sticking with what we have.

Finally, please, when responding, if you could be specific about why you're recommending a particular application it would be very much appreciated. I know there are plenty of people who feel their particular chosen CMS is the best and want to advocate strongly for it. So by all means, advocate away, but try to be clear about what makes it best for this unique usage. It won't be very helpful if we just get suggestions without any explanations or criteria upon which to make a choice.

Also, if you're able to offer some insight regarding the amount of time/effort required to modify your suggested application, that would be fantastic.

I'm very much looking forward to seeing your suggestions. Thank you sincerely in advance.

__________________
Jade Burnside, Ahead of the Web
What good is your web site if no one can find it?
SEO & Optimized Web Site Design