One step closer to prototyping

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.