I’ve had my head in ExpressionEngine development for a couple weeks straight now, working on sites for clients. ExpressionEngine is a CMS (content management software) that I discovered last summer, and I have since become something of an advanced EE developer. It’s an affordable commercial product which combines the strength of open source (development of addons and improvements by the community of developers) with the sort of support which isn’t as hit or miss as other open source, free platforms like Drupal or WordPress, which, while powerful, drive me nuts both in implementation and in trying to get help with problems. I’m something of an EEvangelist these days. It’s great software, flexible, customizable, fast, and powerful.
But it’s exceedingly hard for me to make the LiL upgrade project a priority while concurrently running my business. And though transporting existing WordPress blogs into EE is possible, it’s tricky, and something I would likely want to hire out to a pro. The software also costs some small amount of cash, and in order to prioritize my time (and EE takes a lot of time to custom-develop) I need to at least get paid a little bit. Also, I may want to buy some of the affordable modules other developers have created to accomplish goals such as a recommended list with ratings, etc. So. Here’s the deal.
I am looking for advanced pledges of donations to make this happen. My goal is $1500 in total promised money (if we go above that, more features will be built). I say pledged donations because I don’t want to actually take anyone’s money unless I reach the goal and can actually do this project. Don’t pledge if you think you won’t have the money in a month. And don’t pledge if you can’t afford it, either, I don’t want blood from a stone!
What you’ll get for your money, if the project can go forward:
- Community posting ability and User Post list similar (but improved!) to Blue Mass Group or dKos (though User Post privileges will be given out on a case by case basis, to maximize quality, and geographical/community group/political/statewide coverage)
- Registered user system with email validation – no more waiting for moderation, just log in and comment.
- A very cool events calendar that any registered user can add to.
- Some sort of ratings system/recommend list
- Moderator ability to “frontpage” interesting or important posts from users
- Better organization of information
- A far better advanced search function – EE’s native search module is incredible.
Other cool ideas that could be incorporated:
- Ability to grant community users the privilege to post photo galleries or MP3 podcasts.
- RSS feeds in the sidebar from other regional progressive or governmental blogs like richardhowe.com, jackiedoherty.org, or the CM’s blog so you always know when they’ve posted something new, and we at LiL can more regularly drive traffic to these excellent resources.
- Other requested features you might think of that you would like to see. Have a cool idea? Let me know!
There you have it. There’s all this great potential, but it takes a lot of time and money to make it happen, and I just can’t do it alone. But with help, this site can become more useful to the community, the way I always had intended it to be. If you can pledge, any amount (and only pledge if you intend to follow through, on the honor system!) send me an email, lynne [at] leftinlowell.com (replace the [at] with @ and get rid of the spaces) so I can tally up the amounts and see if this ship can afford to leave the port. đŸ™‚
I want to try to capitalize and improve upon the community-blog model that’s been pioneered by Scoop-driven blogs, without miring the site in outdated or inflexible code. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide, and I hope we can make this a reality.
I need to find a job!
Sounds like a great idea and I’m going to check out ExpressionEngine (that’s a great name).
or know one who is willing to donate his/her time. (It may be considerable.)
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p>At any rate, I wish you LUCK!
Unless you want to build plugins or the like.
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p>However, yes, in an emergency, I can do PHP. Though I don’t anticipate having to with the platform I want to use.
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p>A site this complex as the one I’d like to have for LiL I can probably build in 80 or so hours – or less. I just finished an EE-driven site, which took me just over 40 hours, that is fairly complex, but not overly so. Of course that was with my client giving me the HTML already built but since his code was a bit old school and gave me trouble, so I anticipate my simpler design (div layouts with CSS and a simple 3-col layout, with few graphics) won’t take too long to build templates for. I’ll likely borrow some of the current design and color scheme from the existing site anyway.
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p>So yes, I’m going to be taking a pay cut to do this project, especially if I have to hire out for some certain things, but that’s a “donation” of my time I am willing to make if I can at least have SOME assurances of a small paycheck for developing it. đŸ™‚ I just can’t afford to stop all my paying gigs for two free weeks worth of my time. Which means this project would never get started. Actually, that’s exactly what’s been happening in the last year or so! I’ve been talking about upgrading LiL a long time. I even made an attempt – actually two! – with WordPress, but had trouble finding the right plugins, and when I did find them, making them work.
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p>Ditching WordPress for EE will take longer but give me flexibility and expanded options, so I feel it’s worth it.
just because I had a spare machine hanging around, I feel your pain. I like LiL, though.
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p>DKos evidently runs with 2 paid employees (an administrator and a tech), and it’s the flagship of blogger community sites, so I expect LiL can get up and running on lots less.
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p>Having said that, I’d be willing to pony up some money. Not much, I work at a Barnes and Noble now.
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p>I know how you feel though. It’s wonderful to build something special đŸ™‚