[Ryan_Todd]

Timeline:

1. Once upon a time, we used e107 (with a few plugins) for a dual-purpose internal and external website: about us and history pages, forums, image gallery, document repository.
2. Over time, that started getting punched through with security holes, so we ported the whole thing to vBulletin (with lots of plugins).
3. We eventually decided that we aught to provide a formal front-end site separate from our internal back-end, so one of the students then developed a full-featured CMS completely from scratch.
4. When the student in question graduated, we evaluated the custom CMS for long-term maintainability, and discovered that he had installed a backdoor and obfuscated a lot of the key internals. This led to us swapping out the custom front-end site in favor of Joomla.
5. The Joomla front-end lasted about as long as the custom CMS before we got tired of the mismatch between what we wanted to do with it and the features it offered, so now we're running Wordpress for the front end. This one's still new as of the 2015 season, however, so there's plenty more work to be done.

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Thoughts about our current setup:

• Internal forums are a good format for planning & collaboration during the off hours
• The internal image gallery is internal, so no privacy concerns even though any member can contribute
• Social media presence: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube
• We use Instagram as an external photo gallery; these pics are curated by mentors, and are automatically echoed across multiple social media platforms
• All videos are curated by mentors and hosted on YouTube
• The internal document repository (custom code) was nice, but we ended up pushing it to Google Docs and making it public instead
• External front-end is all business
• Forums have had problems with misuse / inappropriate conduct in the past, so only mentors have control there, and all registrations require individual approval
• Front-end is entirely student-run; mentors' only role there is to sign off on changes