PHP Developers Wanted ASAP for Two Vital Tasks

[Jason Dunn]

Ok gang, here's the deal: many months ago, I made a call for developers. About a dozen people responded, then I got insanely busy and didn't make the time to contact the kind people who wanted to help us out. When I finally got back to them, about six were still interested in helping us. A few projects were handed out, but unfortunately nothing has happened - people get busy, which I can certainly appreciate, but these are some super-critical projects that need to get done. Fabrizio is busy working on some larger projects for me (in addition to his clients of his own), so it's time to give this another try and see if there are any volunteer developers out there who can help our community. I might be able to scourge up some goodies to bribe you as well. ;-)<br /><br />There are two modules that need developing: a contest module, and a shopping module. The contest module is the one that's more pressing, and here's why: we constantly have developers and vendors contacting us, offering us products to give away to you, our readers. The problem is that we don't have an easy way of having the prizes be given out based on certain criteria: say, for example, people that have posted in the past month. With 18,000+ registered forums users, quite often we're giving away prizes to people who haven't visited the site in months. What we'd really like to do is have the flexibility to have contests be open to everyone, people that post in a certain thread, people that have posted recently, that sort of thing. We also need a better method of tracking and creating new contests - if we had that, we could have many more contests, because our current method is manual and painful. If we can get an experienced PHP developer to help us create this contest module, we'll be able to give you all an opportunity to win many more prizes. How's that sound? :-) Any volunteers? Oh, and I should add that if this is in place relatively soon and working the way it should work, we're going to try for another January 1st giveaway bonanza! :mrgreen:<br /><br />The second module we need developed is the "Shopping Mall" module - I won't go into a lot of details, but it's basically a module that will allow me to build links, XML feeds, and images into an affiliate zone. I'm often asked "How do I support your site by buying from vendor XYZ - do you have an affiliate link?". This would give me a centralized location to manage all those links and feeds from a browser-based interface. The developer helping with this project would be helping to keep Pocket PC Thoughts alive and kicking, which is something we all want. :-) Any takers?<br /><br />If you're a PHP developer interested in helping with either of these projects, please contact me <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/contact.php">using the contact form</a>. We're looking for people who can commit to a relatively rapid development cycle and can crank it out.

[Perry Reed]

It's a shame you're not doing this in ASP.Net! My PHP skills are pretty weak...

[Jason Dunn]

It's a shame you're not doing this in ASP.Net! My PHP skills are pretty weak...

We've talked about moving to a Windows box for quite some time, bu the costs of what we'd need (Web Server 2003 + Exchange 2003 + SQL Server) would be painfully high. So, at the moment, we're Linux+PHP. My personal preference would be to move to Windows, but that's not possible at the moment (and would take an insane amount of work).

[Perry Reed]

Yeah, I understand. Microsoft likes to talk TCO, but that upfront cost is a killer. It sure would be nice if Mono were a more complete solution.

[rlobrecht]

You'd probably need a little more hardware for that Windows solution as well.

[Jason Dunn]

You'd probably need a little more hardware for that Windows solution as well.

Correct - we'd need 4 GB for sure, and the odds of being able to run a Web server + Exchange + SQL Server on the same box are slim to none.

Anyway, it's more an issue of having to re-code things from PHP to ASP, and that's not a step we're willing to take right now.

I really didn't want this to turn into a Linux versus Windows thread. ;-)

[Perry Reed]

Correct - we'd need 4 GB for sure, and the odds of being able to run a Web server + Exchange + SQL Server on the same box are slim to none.

I thought there was a Windows Small Business Server solution that was supposed to do something along those very lines.

I really didn't want this to turn into a Linux versus Windows thread. ;-)

Sorry! I didn't mean to start anything like that! I like both OSs, myself. :)

[dean_shan]

The problem is that we don't have an easy way of having the prizes be given out based on certain criteria: say, for example, people that have posted in the past month. With 18,000+ registered forums users, quite often we're giving away prizes to people who haven't visited the site in months.

Yes I'm glad that you are wanting to change that. I'm ready to win a prize.

[Janak Parekh]

Correct - we'd need 4 GB for sure, and the odds of being able to run a Web server + Exchange + SQL Server on the same box are slim to none.
I thought there was a Windows Small Business Server solution that was supposed to do something along those very lines.
It is, but SBS has serious limitations on the number of connections, and wouldn't scale to the number of users we want. It's designed for a LAN workgroup. Standalone versions would also work on the same box, but they're not designed to -- an Active Directory domain controller is rather resource-intensive, and is required for Exchange.

--janak

[Daviddjr]

Hello,

I'm kind of assuming you have but have you checked out any of the premade scripts that are out there?

http://www.hotscripts.com has a bunch

Contests:
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Contests_and_Awards/index.html

E-Commerce:
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/index.html

Just a thought.

As far as the Contest script, would you say that's it's mostly behind the scenes stuff where you can run queries to pull the appropriate users?

David Devaney, Jr.

[Perry Reed]

I thought there was a Windows Small Business Server solution that was supposed to do something along those very lines.
It is, but SBS has serious limitations on the number of connections, and wouldn't scale to the number of users we want. It's designed for a LAN workgroup. Standalone versions would also work on the same box, but they're not designed to -- an Active Directory domain controller is rather resource-intensive, and is required for Exchange.

Good point. And I do know that, in general, trying to put AD and Exchange on the same server is a very bad idea.

[glaggle]

Just out of curiosity, what would Exchange be needed for if you did move to a Windows platform? And couldn't you still use MySQL if you wanted on a Windows platform? You would just be enabling the use of ASP.NET.

[Jason Dunn]

I'm kind of assuming you have but have you checked out any of the premade scripts that are out there?

No, I didn't do much looking, mostly because I have a very specific vision in mind for what I want to do and I've never seen anything like it. Plus, we'd need it to tap directly into phpBB, so we'd need to write that part of it ourselves. Thanks though!

[MacBirdie]

I could help but have some coding for my own site to do right now, so... bad timing Jason. ;)
It'd be kinda cool to get back to the Contest Script Drawing Board though. Well, maybe some other time (in 2068 that is). :)


BTW: Hotscripts - yuck.

[Mark One]

What ever you do do - ffs don't migrate to an MS platform. You'll regret it.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

[Janak Parekh]

Just out of curiosity, what would Exchange be needed for if you did move to a Windows platform?
Mail infrastructure, which is handled by our current box. We could certainly use third-party mail, but that factors into the cost -- and we have some very customized setups for newsletter mailings and such that have to be considered.

And couldn't you still use MySQL if you wanted on a Windows platform? You would just be enabling the use of ASP.NET.
Actually, yes, you could. As you could with Apache... but we're rapidly approaching the configuration the box runs, just with a different kernel. ;) It would certainly be a consideration if ASP .NET was the immediate future, but it's not, since the codebase is already developed.

--janak

[Janak Parekh]

What ever you do do - ffs don't migrate to an MS platform. You'll regret it.
It's not quite that simple. ;) We've got two sysadmins on the team that have lots of IT experience, so if we were to switch, it would certainly be for a darned good reason. Anyway, it's not happening at the moment, so don't worry about it.

--janak

[davea0511]

For your ecommerce needs you might want to check out the OS Commerce community: http://www.oscommerce.com. It's an open source shopping cart with tons of user contributions - I would not be surprised if what you are looking for is already done there, and again, it's all open source. The community is very helpful and I'm sure that for a small fee you could get one of them to set it all up for you.

I know very little about linux, but I was able to set up my own commerce website with it: http://www.sleepwavelabs.com/commerce

[manywhere]

Does anyone know if Jason got a hold of people for this job? (I think he's away from PPCT right now, correct?)

I myself might be able to find time to experiment with PHPbb and MySQL to see if it might be possible to create some cool contest script. I'm not saying that I can accomplish that -- just experiment and see where it goes... ;)

[Kati Compton]

I could do the backend pretty easily, but it's the frontend to me that's always a pain - outputing HTML forms properly, interfacing with phpBB, etc.

[Janak Parekh]

Does anyone know if Jason got a hold of people for this job? (I think he's away from PPCT right now, correct?)
I have no idea, since he is indeed on vacation.

I could do the backend pretty easily, but it's the frontend to me that's always a pain - outputing HTML forms properly, interfacing with phpBB, etc.
Are you volunteering? :razzing: I thought that moderating thing kept you busy enough as it is... ;)

--janak

[manywhere]

I could do the backend pretty easily, but it's the frontend to me that's always a pain - outputing HTML forms properly, interfacing with phpBB, etc.
Maybe we should put our brains together (figuratively speaking :!: )... ;)

[Kati Compton]

Heh - I think it'd be best if a single person did it - sorry, wasn't volunteering, just commenting that to me the interface is the harder part.

[Janak Parekh]

Maybe we should put our brains together (figuratively speaking :!: )... ;)
The problem, more than brains, is time. We've had lots of volunteers in the past, but only a few can really devote the time to a project like this. ;)

--janak