EventOrb.com started out with an event promoter client of my freelance service requesting an update to a site I had built for his organization in PHP a while ago. Because I had my hands full at the time, I remember wishing there was a social portal that served the needs of event promoters so that I could point him in that direction and call it a wrap. Unfortunately, there were none that quite fully met his needs and he was a good client, so I thought the next best thing would be to kill two birds with one stone, by taking another shot at creating a hopefully profitable public facing web portal while providing my client with a standalone website in the process. In other words, I would pick up a check for building a site for him, and reuse my Core objects to build one that could support multiple users. Things worked out a little differently, but EventOrb was an outcome nonetheless.
So if you have about 6 months of your life and about $10k to spend building a website on the scale of EventOrb, here’s what you might need.
1. Development Platform
- .Net Framework 2.0
- MSSQL 2005
- Enterprise Library
- Ajax Toolkit Library
2. A fast development machine
- * Dell XPS (about mine)
3. Dedicated Hosting
* HostMySite
4. Video Streaming Server
* Amazon s3
5. A host of third party tools (unless you want to spend 6 years instead of 6 months developing )
* Ajax Framework: Component Art
* FLV Player: Agriya FlV Player(oh, and by the way, purchase nothing else from Agriya besides their player, I’ll explain later)
* Blog: BlogEngine.net
* Documenting todo lists etc: Google docs
* Address book importing:Plaxo
6. A Web/Graphic Designer, Programmer , yellow belt DBA, lightweight Flash developer and nutcase
* Jonathan Awotwi
The Strategy
I recently found out about SCRUM and found it rather interesting for the simple reason that I had been practicing a kind of one man SCRUM not only for EventOrb, but also for HomeTeamManager.com for the last couple of years without knowing it. The idea of SCRUM in a nutshell is to audit yourself continuosly as you are developing. What did you work on yesterday? What are you working on now and what will you be working on tomorrow? Those are the three key questions that SCRUM development force you to answer every day. I knew if I didn’t stick to hard deadlines, I would never really get anything accomplished, at least not in the timeframe I had in mind. Starting out, I made a mental note of things that needed to get done, developed my Photoshop mockups, the directory structure and setup my development environment in IIS etc., but as time went on, I started to use Google Docs to keep a written list of stuff I needed to do.
Build a Core set of Objects
My experience as a developer in a certain credit card services company that shall remain nameless taught me some valuable lessons in Object Oriented programming. Prior to working there, I had ample theortical knowledge and some experience as to how to program using the concepts of inheritance, interfaces etc. However, no one company made it more evident why it was necessarry than that company. It wasn’t long after I started working there that I begun to isolate my own custom built core set of objects that could be re-used across my freelance clients, and across projects, and boy did it pay off. Let’s just say EventOrb would have taken much longer than 6 months if I didn’t already have a robust set of Core business and data access objects and Utilities ready for use.
Managing Your Hours
It was tough developing around a regular 9 to 5 (well duh!). I would work 45 minutes during my train ride to work in the morning, 45 minutes coming back and about 4 to 5 hours after work. Weekends I would code for about 8 hours provided I didn’t have much else to do. A little late for a disclaimer, but this isn’t exactly the healthiest way to spend 6 months of your life. Event Orb Features
These are the features that make up EventOrb:
The Front Facing Application
1. Multi-tenant Application
2. Social Networking
3. Internal Messaging
4. Event creation
5. Event Page (modular web portal gets generated automatically for every event that gets created)
6. Flyer uploads
7. Photo Uploads
8. Video Uploads
9. Asynchronous Event Search
10. Event Templating or Themeing
11. Evite-like features
12. Customizable Event Invitations
13. Photo Search
14. Video Search
15. Photo and Video Commenting
16. Embeddable Video
17. Event Rating and commenting
18. Social bookmarking
19. Event Geo-location on google maps
20. Multiple Event Calendars
Backend – Control Panel Application
Management modules for a handful of the features mentioned above.
Service Applications
Scheduled Console applications and services for sending emails, keeping objects cached etc.
Stay tuned for Part 2.