Upgrading OrangePolitics

Thursday marks the 9th anniversary of the day OrangePolitics came to be. A few of you old timers will remember that it didn't always work the way it did today. OP's first platform was MovableType. It didn't offer much in the way of comment moderation, which led to some very crazy things being posted on the site. In 2004, I moved the site to Wordpress, an open source platform that was better, but lacked some key community elements.

Five years ago, I asked for donations from the OP community to help bring us to a proper community platform. Readers donated $1,134 and we were able to move the site to Drupal 5. I think most people agree that having community tools such as real profiles for each user and the ability for everyone to blog without having to publish to the front page are big improvements. 

But today we are still running Drupal version 5, while most Drupal sites are using version 6 or 7. This means that the latest features and interface improvements are not available to us. Another benefit of upgrading the site is that we can bring hosting costs down from $425 to about $180 per year. I spent some long nights trying to upgrade the site myself, but ultimately wasn’t able to make the transition work.

I spent some time looking for students that might like to learn some valuable Drupal skills, but to no avail. We need to pay for some professional help. Fortunately, we have a great community of Drupal developers here in the Triangle. I think our migration could be done with 10 hours of consulting time, which is not cheap. If we can secure a discount rate, this would total $800.

It’s time for the community to pitch in again. Your contributions in 2007 allowed OrangePolitics to become a true community platform, now we need your help to keep it going and keep innovating. Please make a small donation online or at our birthday party and tell a friend today why OP deserves their support.