ProcessWire developer for consulting community

[Bogdan&Andrea]

Hey guys

We are a small team planning to build a community to offer consulting services. We are looking for a developer to set up the community and like the concept of ProcessWire a lot.

The services will be rendered via a teleconferencing back-end already built. The community will be members-only and will include features like member profile pages, calendar, internal e-mail, uploading/downloading document files (e.g., pdf, doc and jpeg), social media integrations, authorisation from social sites and payment system. The back-end should be able to manage a few hundred thousands total users and about 10-20k concurrent users.

We are very open to sponsor some of the modules / functionalities that will be developed for this project to be released as open source to the PW community.

Design/branding/logo will be taken care of separately by web designers, who will provide templates (e.g., in Adobe Illustrator) for the main pages.

If you are interested, we have a more comprehensive RfP ready, including wireframes. A customary NDA is required and we would like to start the development asap and go live 6 to 8 weeks afterwards. We expect the budget to be close to $10,000 for the development only.

Please contact us if you are interested in working on this project and also with any questions at: consulting.emea@gmail.com

Thanks in advance,
Bogdan&Andrea

[ryan]

The services will be rendered via a teleconferencing back-end already built. The community will be members-only and will include features like member profile pages, calendar, internal e-mail, uploading/downloading document files (e.g., pdf, doc and jpeg), social media integrations, authorisation from social sites and payment system. The back-end should be able to manage a few hundred thousands total users and about 10-20k concurrent users.

Sounds like an interesting project. Admittedly, when reading your description it sounds a lot more like a fit for the software we are typing on here (IP.Board). Your development budget probably won't enable you to have anything custom built, so you'd need to focus on utilizing stuff that's already built and apply your budget towards integration and configuration of those things. As much as I'd like to see you use ProcessWire for this stuff, your project scope seems to fit almost exactly with what IP.Board and vBulletin provide out of the box. We are all about using the best tool for a particular job, and ProcessWire is the best tool for most of them. But as you can see, we use IP.Board for our forums here because we feel it's the best tool for forums. My impression of your project requirements is that IP.Board and/or vBulletin would be good things to look at first. 

[Beluga]

Dont listen to the pragmatist!

Seriously though, I have been known to offer money in the hopes that some PW dev would get inspired to create community/forum building blocks. I'm again offering 500 euros towards any forum features, so now the budget is $10k + 500 €!

[Bogdan&Andrea]

Ryan, thank you for your feedback.

We will look more closely at IP.Board and vBulletin, which seem powerful platforms and potentially good starting points.

At the same time we would like to retain the flexibility in terms of design and functionality offered by PW and we are open regarding development budget.

If any PW developer reading this thread would like to learn more, we are happy to provide details and discuss budget and time frame.


@Beluga: we are not planning to include a forum in our website, however will be glad to coordinate efforts if we decide to have one at a later stage. We are also open to release other community building blocks developed for this project as open source

 

[dragan]

I would take a look at things that are already out there, i.e. Mahara + Moodle.

re: forum integration

The major headache is syncing CMS to forum users. There are various "bridge" scripts out there, but they're all somewhat problematic. You never know what update X will change. But as long as the forum script is also open-source, a CMS integration is def. doable.

edit: just stumbled over this http://www.invisionpower.com/support/guides/_/advanced-and-developers/application/application-extension-membersyncphp-r185 - I guess that could be a good start / building block.

[Joss]

You might also want to look at Liferay

There are two versions - the community driven one and the supported EE version. The latter has a longer developement cycle, is quite expensive, but the support level is very high.

The community one is more bleeding edge and does get used in a lot of projects.

Liferay allows you to create a complete organisational solution with multiple websites, user groupings and so on. Each "site," which can be public, restricted or completely private, comes with fully developed forums, wikis and blogs, as well as a CMS for running any internet/extranet system. There are also a lot of plugins to increase social interaction and a hook system that allows you to link it to other databases or systems.

All its functionality is based around Portlets (their versions of plugins) and there is an ide running on Eclipse which helps in the development of hooks, portlets and themes. 

Although it is a java solution running on Tomcat and others, portlets can be written in a variety of languages including PhP.

It might be worth you looking at, but one warning: it is a bit of a huge beast and you will need to find an experienced developer if you want to do anything clever with it.

You can download the community edition and run it as a stand alone locally to play with - it comes complete with the tomcat server and all necessary bits.

Having said all that about Liferay, PW is a hell of a lot more accessible and much, much easier to develop with!!!

[BUCKHORN]

Sometimes recreating the wheel is good for innovation. Personally, I'd like to see a more modern, simple and elegant solution on the market, and what better foundation to build on than ProcessWire. That being said, the budget really is insufficient for a project of this scope, but it is a starting point. Are you willing to compromise on some features or release them as you can afford additional costs? Is this project for your company or client to use internally or are you planning on selling subscriptions to the public? 

If you want a pretty good DIY solution, check out Podio. It will do everything you require, but it won't do it as well as a custom solution using Drupal or ProcessWire.

[Bogdan&Andrea]

Thank you all for the suggestions!

We would like to develop the first version of the website described above keeping the option to substantially expand its functionalities later on. That will depend on the success of the service offered (@sshaw: the service will be open to third parties / the public). So platforms like ProcessWire and ExpressionEngine seem to be solid starting points.

As anticipated we have good flexibility in terms of budget and are open to discuss a revised quote with developers willing to take a closer look at the requirements.

If this project seems a good challenge please be in touch on this forum, via PM or by email