OP3
Last year we asked readers to donate to help up upgrade the site from an ancient Drupal 5 installation to the more-current Drupal 6. Last fall and spring, you donated $800 to this cause. It took longer to get started than we had hoped, but our own Jason Baker has been working hard on the upgrade since this summer.
Tonight at OP's 10th birthday party you can see the fruits of our labor as Jason will be demonstrating a beta version of the new site, which is actually on Drupal 7! (I know this means very little to most of you, but it's really excellent news for those of us who administer the site.) We are planning to launch the new site shortly after the election.
Although it may be down the totem pole in your interest list given the number of interesting political happenings of late, I just wanted to give everyone a quick update about the OP upgrade currently underway. I have been working with Ruby over the past several months to implement a much-needed upgrade of this site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7.
OrangePolitics is a community resource established in 2003, which includes community blogs, election information, and live online candidate forums. The site has been using Drupal 5 since 2008 and is sorely in need of an update to Drupal 6 or 7. (Learn more about what is involved at drupal.org/documentation/upgrade/5/6.)
Drupal is a powerful, open source community content platform based on PHP and MySQL. It is growing dramatically in popularity and is currently used by thousands of enterprise web sites from Whitehouse.gov to PopSugar.com. Drupal developers are in high demand, so this is an opportunity to develop an extremely marketable skill. The project will be supervised by OP’s founder, who is a professional Drupal administrator and is well-connected in the nonprofit tech community.
In addition to migrating the MySQL database from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and moving the site to a new web host, there may also be other opportunities including Drupal theming, developing additional features, or proposing new page layouts for the site.
Budget: $800
Deadline: Flexible.
As I wrote three months ago, OrangePolitics is overdue for a software upgrade. 5 years ago, you donated $1,000 to help move the site from WordPress to Drupal, and I think it was well worth the effort! Unfortunately, the software of the site has not seen a major update since that time. We need professional help again to upgrade the site from Drupal 5 to version 6 or 7, which will also allow us to move to cheaper web hosting. (I currently pay $35/month, but it could be a low as $10/month if we move the site.)
With the state of our local media ecosystem, OrangePolitics will only become more essential. And as Jeff wrote, we have added some great features such as live tweeting local government meetings and our own online candidate forums along with the always-informative blogging of your fellow community activists.
We're very grateful to the 15 people who already donated $500 last fall, and hope that a few more people can step up and get us the rest of the way to $800.
First some digital goodies: This site has a few cool tricks and an archive of 3,600 posts that don't get utilized much. One is the random post generator: http://orangepolitics.org/random. Another is what I call "in review." It allows you filter and sort posts by date and rating to find some of the best (and worst) and most commented posts of previous eras: http://orangepolitics.org/in-review. For example, here are the top rated posts of the past 365 days.
And some less virtual treats: at today's birthday party we'll be serving BBQ sliders, catfish bites, and hushpuppies from Hillsborough BBQ, as well as fresh, delicious beer (by the pint) from Mystery Brewing. And there will also be a limited number of cupcakes from Weaver Street Market's bakery for the early birds.
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.
For the folks who missed our OP Happy Hour on Friday, you missed my big announcement. Ever since I launched this site in 2003, I have always wanted OP to be led by a team of people who can bring in a wider range of perspectives. This month, we are beginning an experiment that is a first step toward establishing something like a board of editors or formal leadership team for the site!
The inaugural board of editors is: Damon Seils, Molly DeMarco, Jason Baker, and Erin Crouse. They have alrerady had a positive effect on the amount and quality of discussion here on OP. I'm so excited to have their energy and ideas invested in this community.
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