Just shelled out a stack of greenbucks for the core of the site: a social networking platform + 1 year of hosting from the developer who put it together.
“Platform” is probably a little generous. It’s Drupal plus a collection of 79 modules, many of which look hastily slapped in there, that together can potentially form the core of a social networking platform. I didn’t buy it as a turnkey social network; I bought it primarily as a timesaving measure, and (more importantly) to get access to the expertise of the developer who created it. He’s going to be helping us translate the requirements into a development strategy. This is exactly the expertise I needed.
So Ron (the developer) is putting together the modules on the server, and will finish it by end of day tomorrow, at which point I will start configuring the content types. My goal is to have some sort of demo available in two months – even if it isn’t pretty – so we can show it to potential donors. And I know more or less what content types and fields are going to be required, so I can set those up in advance of the UI design.
It’s hard to believe that this project is only 16 days old – I just looked back and Claudia got in touch with me on the 19th of August. We’ve made tremendous progress in a very short period of time. This is encouraging, especially since there is so much more still left to do.
It’s exciting to read about your progress with this! I look forward to seeing where it goes.