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Date Posted:	November 5, 2009
Planned Start Date:	November 5, 2009
Type:	Hourly
Main Category:	Web Development
Sub Category:	Other - Web Development
Skills:	vBulletin web design
Estimated Workload:	As needed - Less than 10 hrs/week
Estimated Duration:	3 to 6 months
Last Buyer Activity:	November 17, 2009
Candidates:	5 - average $14.20/hr
Interviews:	none

Cancelled

Date Cancelled:	November 17, 2009
Reason Cancelled:
No developer for requested skills

English skill:

above 5

Member Since:	October 29, 2009
Country:	United States (GMT-06)
City:	Houston

Jobs Posted:	3
Jobs Filled:	0
Jobs Not Yet Filled:	1

Current Team size:	0
Hours billed, last 30 days:	0
Total oDesk Hours:	0.00
Feedback Score:	-

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Please do not send generic template responses. I will ignore these. I need specific help for a specific project type, and I need to know that you have experience with vBulletin. I don't need to hear about your list of qualifications, unless you have also experience with customizing Ning or custom PHP/MySQL coding experience. Please show examples of vBulletin work you've done.

I posted before for the total project, but didn't get detailed responses, so now I'm posting for specific portions of the project. This is for vBulletin developers.

I am looking to find someone who can answer some questions about vBulletin that will help me decide if it is the best platform for the site I want to build.

Please provide some insight as to how much of the items below vBulletin can cover. I represent a client who is looking to build a site outside my areas of expertise. If you can provide some insight and are willing to explain things via email, you will be hired for consultation and possibly designing/coding her site in vBulletin, if that's the platform she goes with.

Now some of the specs listed below are going to have to be run outside of vBulletin, but we want to choose a platform (either Ning or vBulletin) that can cover the most specs, then go from there.

We would like to use the style attached. I'm assuming that vBulletin has some kind of widget system??

For example, we will want to use aMember for protected areas. How does vBulletin work with aMember? (I'm familiar with setting up aMember with WordPress)

To give you an idea of the main specs (please respond to as many as possible):

users need to be able to:

Create profiles for themselves with as much or as little identifying information as they want. Some users will want to be completely anonymous, with no photo, no info and a fake name. Others will be fine with people knowing who they are. I want all options to be open.

Post messages to the whole group and get responses from others. FYI my users are all academics or ex-academics so their messages can sometimes be LONG. I would like you to research any built-in length limits for postings on both sites. For example, I think Ning may have a 2000 character limit. That would pose a problem unless there is some way to override it. Also want to know about different mechanisms for ongoing discussion (e.g. threaded discussion board versus blogs and god knows what else is out there).

Form sub-groups ("forums"?) to discuss specific interests on an ongoing basis (e.g. Careers in the Nonprofit Sector). Maybe a user doesn't want to hear all the general-discussion stuff but is very interested in hearing what people have to say about employment in a certain sector or industry. I want them to have control over that.

Create their own little blogs where they can spout off and develop their own audiences within the site.

Advertise user-organized F2F meetups in their local areas (could use Meetup for that I suppose, with events merely listed on my site)

Peruse lists of recommended resources (books, websites, articles)--resource lists must be linked/embedded rather than just listed in one big long scroll.

Post and read job announcements. I want to make posting as easy as possible because it is currently super-easy. The current process is, people receive random job announcements by email from friends, other lists, organizations, etc. They currently simply forward these emails to the listserv. I want it to be just as easy to share a job on the Versatile PhD website. If they could simply copy/paste email text into a field on the site, that would be OK, but even that is still harder than forwarding an email. See what you can find out about this. Maybe they could forward the email to me, or to jobs@versatilephd.com, and I could do the copy/pasting. I'd rather not, but if it's the only way...or could it be done automatically?

Buy my book and other original documents off the site

"Friend" each other, build up collections of friends (like on facebook), message their friends

Upload documents for the benefit of others

Access past panel discussions by topic, not by date (see 1st bullet below)

Subscribe via RSS feed (and/or other common mechanisms)--and choose exactly what they will receive emails about. I need to learn a lot more about RSS feed and those types of things. I do not currently get any feeds and have tried to set them up for myself several times but failed because I don't understand the concept of a "reader." I cannot be the only person in my group to have encountered this obstacle. The bottom line is, users should be able to control what kinds of info they receive from the site by email so that each person can make themselves happy and change their settings easily. But I don't want them to hit technological roadblocks as I did.

I need to be able to:

Organize panel discussions where 3-5 guest bloggers come on the site for a one-week period, share their stories, and answer questions from users. Please visit the WRK4US website an peruse some of the previous Guest Speaker Discussions so you understand what I am talking about (http://career.studentaffairs.duke.edu/graduate/wrk4us/index.html). One guest blogger at a time is not enough. There has to be some way to have 3-5 guest bloggers share the spotlight in the same discussion, with users commenting and the speakers responding to user comments as well as to each other. For clarity's sake, these discussions are asynchronous. They are not live chats. They are asynchronous conversations taking place within a five-day work week, then preserved for later perusal.

Preserve panel discussions in a special way, like with a special name ("Careers in Museums, November 2009") so they are easy to find by subject and users won't have to slog through general archives to find the panel discussion they want. I would love for this preservation to be automatic--requiring little or no time effort. A little effort, OK. Lots, no bueno. None, perfect.

Have a variety of options re how tightly I control what gets posted: e.g. I want to be able to screen postings before they go up and/or remove inappropriate postings, ban problem users, ideally ban their computers so it isn't so easy for them to just come back and create a new profile. I would also want to be able to un-ban.

Offer "webinars" to users for a fee

Make new users read and agree to a simple "terms and conditions of use" that I will write with my lawyer

Offer free downloadable versions of my press kit and speaking materials (PDFs? Some other format?)

Sell my book from the site, possibly other documents too

Monitor site traffic, detect meaningful trends, print/email reports, design new queries and reports

Have advertising on the site (e.g. Google AdSense)

Re graphic design, I would love to find a pre-existing theme that fits the bill perfectly, 'cause it sure would save a lot of time, but failing that, I want the option to insert my own CSS, either to alter an existing theme or to create a new theme just for Versatile PhD.

Send out weekly digests of Versatile PhD activity from the site that will reach readers by email. In other words, I want to be able to go to the site, write a digest of what happened that week, and click once to send an email bulletin to all users. Or something analogous to that. If it could be done automatically, fantastic, one less thing for me to do, BUT, I do not have faith in technology's ability to communicate in the right voice for my audience. Maybe what I really need is the ability to set the writing style of the digests.

Thanks for your interest. I look forward to hearing your insight and hope we can form a lasting relationship.

Thanks,
Erin

Title	Name	Initiated By	Date
Wordpress Drupal Joomla Expression Engine and Modx Developer	Tom Neilson	Provider	November 6, 2009
PHP Developer with 3 years Experiance	Saby N.	Provider	November 6, 2009
PHP,MySQL,LAMP,AJAX,Oscommerce,CRE Loaded,Ecommerce Websites Expert	Ashok M.	Provider	November 6, 2009
SVT - Sigma Visual Technologies	Masood Ahmed	Provider	November 7, 2009
Design/CSS/XHTML, Drupal / DNN / vBulletin skinning / app config	Derek Cronk	Provider	November 11, 2009

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