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Kit Car Birthday Makeover,
Part III By James Martell The kit car site is celebrating its second birthday and as such, it is time for an extreme makeover. The original site was constructed in Drupal but this lacked much of the functionality that I was looking for. I wanted members to be able to really have access to videos and photo galleries. This is crucial and surprisingly an area where I feel Drupal is sadly lacking. Therefore, the first thing I did was to take a good hard look at WordPress. WordPress is a content management system that I love and used to develop my own personal site www.JamesMartell.com. WordPress is a terrific all around program, but I didn't think it offered the best feature set for a community site. I chatted with Phil Watkins a good friend and business associate. He had recently spoke to a programmer who said it was possible but it would require custom development. Custom development is something I prefer to stay away from. So, I decided to look for other solutions. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that there is always a solution to just about any problem. However, sometimes the solution is not that easy to uncover, and this was certainly the case in this instance. I decided to develop a list of what I wanted for my community site.
For example, I wanted members to be able to setup and manage their own groups. I also wanted them to be able to import their e-mail lists from Gmail or any of the other popular e-mail programs, and I wanted this e-mail to be handled within the application. Also handy for members would be to be notified any time somebody responded to an article, photo, or video that they had uploaded. The list went on and on. On top of all of this, I also wanted the software to be intuitive and easy to manage and use. As you can imagine, looking at my wish list I started to wonder if I could actually find a suitable solution. But I did :-) Lo and behold, one morning I awoke excited and asked my wife Arlene if this was just a dream. You see the evening before I had spent three hours working with the software and had managed to construct an amazing demo website where everything on my wish list has been incorporated. Not only is this new content management system easy for me to use as the Administrator but all the BootCamp members have found it easy to use as well.
This new software is the "WordPress" for community sites. I launched it on August 16th and it now features more than 300 articles, 500 photos and 250 videos with all the functionality I had hoped for. So please come on over and check out the new kit car site. I love the site and I'm certain you'll be impressed as well. I also look forward to all your comments. I have some really exciting news for you in the next edition of this newsletter, where I'll be announcing and giving you the heads up on this impressive game changing software. So stay tuned and watch this spot. All the best,
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This is what I came up with:
a photo gallery; video
gallery; events calendar;
chat forum and a blog. At
first glance, this all
looked easy enough. However,
I have found that
functionality becomes more
complicated, especially if
you want your members and
visitors to be able to do
everything that you can do.
