New Home for OMEGA Chapter

It's official, the OMEGA Chapter system has a new home. I needed a little more control to manage the performance and security of the application, so I moved it to it's own VPS before the version 1 launch.

The features have really come a long way since it was just a simple app to manage academics for the UNF Alpha Chi Omega chapter.

Core Features

I kept all the academics features - professor reviews, member forum, study hour schedule and calculator, grade recognition submittals, online test files, contact information, etc. - but I've also designed full member profiles, private messaging, financial tracking and accounting, improved forum functionality, dynamic calendar, member searching by names and majors, contact information engine, user information spreadsheet generator, and a lot more.

Admin Control Panel

The administrator feature set has turned out to be quite powerful. The overarching goal was to make sure that all groups would never have to wait to get important information added or removed from their site. Working with the ladies of Alpha Chi, I saw the inconvenience they face when having to remove a bad post or get an event added. It'd often take a few days just to get a forum post deleted.

With the OMEGA Chapter system, administrators can add and remove any post, calendar event, test file, and chapter document in seconds. No phone calls, no waiting, no aggravation. Each group even has complete control over who can join the site; all registrations require a simple approval by an administrator before the user is able to access the site. Administrators can even suspend user accounts in emergency situations through the Admin Control Panel.

Even the public website is editable. Administrators can add new pages at any time, edit the content without any programming experience, rearrange the order the links appear on the site, delete pages, and add and remove photos.

The Future of OMEGA Chapter

I'm considering a few new features and was wondering what you guys think. If you'd like to shape the future of the project or mold OMEGA Chapter to your group's needs, just send me an email with your vote and any other suggestions.

• Member photo albums (right now all pictures are displayed on your profile page)
• Search for members in your classes
• Enhanced public photo gallery with multiple albums, titles, and full descriptions
• Member polling
• Text messaging through the site
• Updating the style of the site, maybe a new design or two?
• Does anyone need more than 4 access levels?

I plan on adding all of these features at some point in the near future, but I was just wondering what users would like the quickest.

But first thing's first...I thought I'd announce the fruition of the official version 1 of the OMEGA Chapter system. I should be posting another article in a few days announcing the details of its release and offering some really cool discounts for any new organizations that would like to begin managing their group online or are just tired of having to wait days on someone else to make the small changes they need or paying hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars a year for the very limited control. I hardly consider making it impossible for a chapter to manage their own site a "security measure."

Try a Demo

If you'd like to try out a demo of the system, just email me and I can send you the login details so your group can test it out.

For more details, check out the project's site, www.omegachapter.com.