cthree

Hi members and S2000 brothers and sisters. As the site develops, expands and grows the day to day work required to keep the site great as it is is increasing. To ensure the continued growth and to made this site even more of a home for S2000 owners and fans to meet and greet I am asking for some help from the members.

Specifically, I need skilled and accomplished web designers and developers to lend a hand and donate a small amount of your skills and time to help with the site. I'm a geek. I can program just about anything and can run servers in my sleep securly and efficiently but I lack certain abilities which I feel we need. Specifically I'm looking for a commercial artist(s) to help design the site's logo, icons and overall look and feel. I could also use some help from skilled PHP/HTML/perl developers to assist in feature improvement and development.

As you may or may not know, S2000Online will be moving to a new software package based on MySQL and PHP3 called vBulletin. We currently use a flat-flie based perl system called UBB. The look and feel of these two packages is vastly different. To see a sample of vBulletin in it's raw, out of the box form, look at www.superhonda.com

This cheezy layout will just not do so I need help bringing it in line with the current layout. In addition, but not necessary to be done at the same time, Id like to personalize the look of S2000online to make it reflect the S2000 more. I'd like to rediesign the buttons and icons and most importantly the logo. The color scheme could also use an overhaul. S2000Online is pretty much stock UBB in layout but I think we deserve someting a bit more topical.

I'm working on the import issue between vB and UBB and same most under control. Post and threads import fine with the exception of the inter-topic links but I have that mainly solved too. What needs work on the PHP front is the PM facility which has some known problems and integrating a new live chat feature we already have running in test. The chat needs to be cleanly integrated into the vB framework and both tasks require some more advanced PHP skills.

The transition to vB will open up a wide variety of options for new features and enhancements not available in the current UBB package, some I've already started on. But the shear number of things that need doing to make the transition smooth and problem free requires that I ask for help. I know there a number of skilled individuals out there in these areas and I'm appealing for your help. I need a transition team and ask that you please help if you can spare the time.

In addition to the development work, I also need so very critical people who can spend a bit of time bashing the new software looking for potential problems. This information will help the transition team pull together everything needed.

So please. please, please if you can let me know. Even a few hours testing would be a big help. The more people we can get to pitch in the less work it will be for any one individual (presently me) and the more testing we do the great the likelyhood of a smooth if not seemless transition.

If you can help in some way, please send me a PM with your skills, background and avaiable time commitment or post here if you don't mind others seeing it. your technical info will help me pair you with the most approprite tasks. Include a preference if you have one.

I am creating a forum called "Transition Team" where we can all meet and discuss and this will be a public forum so if you have comments or suggestions you can add them there are well.

Thanks again for your time and I look forward to working with you in enhancing and furthering this S2000 community

mingster

Cthree, wish I can help. But I'm just a lowly DBA/SA.

Anyone else? Mark?

2x6spds

Uh oh, C3. Superhonda's site is slow. This one works really well and we're all used to it. Are you sure you want to dump a perfectly working format?

2x6

cthree

I too am a great believer in don't fix what ain't broke. But I think that judgement is biased based on how you look at it. It ain't broke for the users but for me and the mods it's really, realy limited. Not a day goes by when some limitation of UBB bites us in the arse. It also makes doing anything with the site beyond what it does now nearly impossible.

SH is slow because they don't have the horsepower nor bandwidth we do. It's not the software and it's also not optimized at all, straight out of the box.

We have a very fast OS on a very fast system with triple 155Mbs OC3 fiber links to three seperate Internet backbone providers, no middle man, eSpire, AT&T and Sprint. That's more effective bandwidth than a Gigabit Ethernet connection. The server is rated for 30 million hits/day To give you some idea of capacity, we use <5% of the servers capacity right now. The entire forum database can be cached in memory.

As an added bonus, the costs just dropped by a 1/3 which means we can go to a bigger system and still stay within budget if nessesary. I think though with the addition of some more sponsors we can opt for a dual server cluster not only spilting the load but also preventing downtime buy having server fault tolerance. We could also add more storage capacity and do some other things. S2000online is a bigtime system. What I don't understand it why the other aren't. I'm not making plans for the winfall just yet until I have some time to evaluate the best plan of action.

It may be a bit slower at first, hardly noticable, but will be faster once optimized. You always start with a baseline and work from there. I can't even being to explain the advantages of the new software compared to UBB nor just how screwed up and end of life UBB really is. It has been hacked to death for many years.

c3

cthree

[QUOTE]Originally posted by mingster:
[B]Cthree, wish I can help. But I'm just a lowly DBA/SA.

2x6spds

Good luck! We'll all be rooting for you and holding our breath!

2x6 and out.

Insomniak

i'll offer my graphical help.. i'm a Web Designer. chthree email me and i'll send you a link or two of my work.
i do flash, graphics, 3d if necassary, so just give me some ideas of what you want for look n' feel and i'll give it a shot and send you a comp.. and any specs you want it built to.. ie: 800x600, whatever.. or completely expandable(time consuming but i'll do it). hehe.. and if you wanna see some of my handy work check out mr. pockets. charlies dog in the photogallery.

there is also another artist on the board from paris that designs w/ a more european look.. maybe he'll give it a shot too since he didn't think much of my s2000 business cars

cthree

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mingster

i'm not very familiar with mysql, but send your queries my way and i can take a look. also need a structure layout of your DB if possible. although if the BBS software is pre-written, aren't the stored procedures prewritten? can you modify it? do you want to? or are we talking about adding extra codes and functionality?

hype

I'm a senior systems programmer (NT/2000). Might be able to help on the systems side a little. What is your operating systems platform? I also do alot of failover and loadbalancing for database and file servers.