-
Adrian Thornton posted an update in the group
Wordpress/BuddyPress Programmers Needed for Version 2: 2 years, 1 month ago · ViewHey there! Excited to be getting involved in Window Farms. The request for help on the front page along with the mysterious appearance of ”drupal” in the URL for this group caught my eye.
With the utmost respect and deference, my humble opinion is that this site would be much better suited to Drupal than Wordpress/Buddypress. Drupal is a much more mature platform than Buddypress, and is far more flexible/extensible. I feel the site could quickly and easily benefit from additional features (i.e. the maps mentioned in the forums of this group) and a cleaner layout using Drupal.
Again, I do not mean the above as criticism – merely positive suggestion. I’d be more than willing to help out as much as I can with a site conversion; I have about six years of experience creating personal, small business, and internal corporate web portals/applications using Drupal. I’m afraid I don’t have tons by way of actual *programming* experience (read: typing characters into a text editor to create things from scratch), but it hasn’t come in the way of creating robust sites in the past.
A quick search of the drupal.org shows a lot of info on converting from Wordpress to Drupal. It sounds like the process is fairly reliable and effective. Several years ago I converted from b2evolution (a cousin of Wordpress) to Drupal with minimal aggravation. Just a thought though: with the evidently RAPID growth of this site, I think a potential conversion sooner rather than later would save a lot of headaches.
Anyway, just thought I’d plug in my 2ยข. Regardless of the direction Window Farms takes, I’m excited to be joining the community!
Covering your bases for expansion is always done better sooner rather than later. I’d be interested in some of the original site designers’ discussion. What other sites have you done Adrian?
Sorry for the late reply – you know how busy things can get.
Unfortunately I don’t have much by way of a web ”portfolio” I could show you. Most of the stuff I’ve done has been either personal websites or small business websites which I was not contracted to maintain after they were built, and have since gone away.
My own personal site is online, and you can check it out at http://canadrian.ca – not much there at the moment aside from aggregation of my social web presence plus my resume. I spent a LOT of time developing a social networking site at http://electricteaparty.net but I have taken it offline for the time being; while once fairly vibrant, the site has turned into a ghost town with the increasing popularity of Facebook. Once I sort out some content access issues, I’ll likely bring it back online.
Aside from my personal projects, I’ve worked on a number of projects for others. Aside from galleries and travel blogs for individuals, I have a few notable accomplishments. Perhaps foremost is my work on a team portal (including issue tracker, wiki, reporting functionality, etc.) while I was at IBM. I also built the original website for the Ilfracombe Town Council (in England), and a corporate site for a video game development firm called Snake Takes Studios, but unfortunately both website projects included no ongoing support contract and have since been replaced.
I think the best way to explore the advantages of Drupal would be for me to throw together a quick demo site (for free, of course). We could try importing a dump of the current site and see how it goes, or just pre-populate it with some example content for demonstration purposes. If this is something that the admin, Britta, etc. would be interested in, I’d be happy to do that.
Sorry, should have tagged @admin and @britta above.