State of the shave, v2

Hello Shaver,

Early this year, my fellow administrator Dave posted his 'State of the Shave' thread, in which he informed you about the state of our site and membership. The numbers have only grown since then. Straight razor shaving is still a growing community, both SRP wise and on a global scale. Even today, we are registering increasing growth. To help manage this growing community, Dave asked for volunteers to become mod.

The call was answered, and we added more mods, so that every forum is now managed by at least 1 but usually 2 mods. The mod team is running smoothly and operating as a well knit team. They are doing a splendid job. Imho, this would qualify the state of the shave a success. It has been this success that has persuaded me to repeat this new public call for help.

Dave's original 'state of the shave' was a reflection of where we were at the time, and where we were going. I would like to do this again. Not in terms of membership, like Dave did, but in terms of the actual site and forum; The tools with which we interact with each other in all those different ways, like the forum, the classifieds, the chat, the wiki, the reviews, ....

As most of you remember, some time ago we organized a fundraiser to help pay for a new server. This fundraiser was an enormous success, and we gathered more money than we had anticipated. We raised enough cash to finally buy the new server that we need in order to host this ever growing community in the years to come.

We have a problem however. Currently the forum is run using vbulletin, which powers a great deal of forums on the web. As far as forums go, it is pretty good, but it has its limitations.

Around the time of the fundraiser, we also discussed internally what we are going to do as a way forward. Do we stick with vbulletin or do we go another route? After debating the various pros and cons and looking at the alternatives, we decided that if we want to have the tools to build this unique community the way we want it, we need to take a different course. In the end, we settled on using drupal. This would give us the benefit of working with a toolkit that would enable us to build the new site ourselves with off the shelf software, and enhance it where we need to.

A concrete example of one of the things we need to do is to implement a new classifieds system that works exactly the way we want it to work in the context of our community, instead of how an external party thinks a general purpose classifieds system should work. I think everybody who has used the classifieds system can attest to the fact that it feels pretty clunky and limited.

We do have a problem on our hands however. And this is the reason I am posting this call to arms, so to speak. Converting the existing site to drupal is a significant task. A lot of work has already been done, but a lot still needs to be done as well. As you all know, the final 20% of a complicated task takes 80 % of the time. And we would like to increase our pace in moving to the new server and some much needed site improvements.

If you have experience with drupal or php, and web development in general, and are interested in helping us out, getting the new site ready for use, please send me a PM or mail me at [email protected] and we'll take it from there. With your help, we can make the site upgrade a resounding success in a foreseeable timeframe.

On a final note, I would like to thank you, the members here, for making this place great. Thanks for being here and thanks for reading this message.

Thanks.
Bruno.

__________________
Bruno van Dooren
SRP Administrator

I can´t help you re the site construction, but I can thank You and Everyone who helps out, Thank You! :rock:

You're welcome. :)

Yeah, I can't help you guys... but I really appreciate the work you put in to make this great forum run. There's no place quite like it!

Good work all, and good luck making the transition.:beer2:

Wish I could be of help.

I do have some knowledge of Web Design in general, but it is at a novice level of sorts. I have an Associates in Web Design and am working on my Bachelors in Web Development. Don't know Drupal or PHP yet, starting SQL next week.

Not sure how much help that would be.