[olug] Perl/PHP/SQL/HTML gurus

[T. J. Brumfield]

I'm looking for a few web gurus who would be interested in working on
an open-source project.

The end goal is to develop a Slashdot-style portal where stories
appear on the front page, but also to provide a full integrated forum
as well where end-users can create threads of their own as well.

Obviously, I'm going to start with a LAMP stack, but I see two primary
ways of going about this.

1 - Start with slashcode (the code that powers Slashdot written in
Perl). I'd want to customize that a bit to add Lightbox support for
image links, and perhaps add some AJAX/HTML5 sexiness. I don't believe
anyone has ever integrated it with phpbb, so we'd have to get phpbb to
read the slashcode user tables for login purposes, and to read
karma/moderation statistics. Ideally, I want to carry over the
slashcode-style moderation into the forum, where users can use
moderation point to mod posts up or down there as well.

2 - Start with Wordpress (written in PHP), which has tons of existing
themes and extensions to customize most of the functionality and
appearance how I want. (I'll probably need to start with wordpress-mu
to have different categories set up as different blogs with full
subdomains, and then aggregate them at one primary portal). But that
means developing the Slashcode-style moderation from scratch. However,
there is existing code to integrate wordpress and phpbb.

With either approach, I want the theme of the main portal to dip into
some of the lovely features HTML5/canvas provides to encourage people
using the site to use modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari,
etc. Even IE9 would be fine when it is released.

The whole project would be open source, probably releasing individual
extensions for Wordpress/phpbb/slashcode separately, as well as the
whole integrated project.

I don't have much cash to hire developers outright at the moment, so
I'm hoping to appeal to fellow open source advocates. However, if I
get one (or a few) developers who crank out the majority of the code
to make this happen, I'd gladly make them co-owners in the resulting
site I plan to build on top of the codebase. There is zero guarantee
said site will become profitable, but it is better than nothing.

-- T. J. Brumfield
"I'm questioning my education
Rewind and what does it show?
Could be, the truth it becomes you
I'm a seed, wondering why it grows"
-- Pearl Jam, Education