UPDATE: Sites Live…

After many months of hard work, Collis Ta’eed (design), Mathias Meyer (Rails), and I have reached the final stages in pre-launch testing for the new Freelance Switch. Within a week or two we will have thoroughly tested the staging site to account for what I’m hoping is almost all bugs. The site is the mashup of three different applications and a seriously cool plugin. Below I’ll let you in on what technologies we used to build this very awesome web site.

Blog & Plugin

For the blog and most of the sites regular content (i.e. contact, about, etc.) I built a WordPress theme that is extremely custom and sexy. In addition to the WordPress theme there are a number of custom & downloaded plugins but only one that really is worth mentioning, an improved version of the Community Links plugin you see at Psd.tuts+ or any of the other tuts+ sites. The plugin works in a similar fashion as the old one but allows the user to upload an image and associate a category with the link. Now everything will be categories and have a thumbnail next to it, nice right?

Forum

Here we used BBpress and a custom theme I coded to match the blog. However, I also had to re-create many of the functions that BBpress comes with to change the output because the theme was not going to show content in a tabular style so I had to un-table the forum. A bit of extra work but well worth it in the end.

Job Board & Freelance Directory

The very talented Mathias Meyer build the backend of this amazing Rails app, my job was to skin it. In the end the old job board got a new makeover and had a directory of freelancer added to it. Some amazing stuff, the addition of the directory is going to be huge in my opinion, but I’ll let you guys be the judge.

All Together

In the end, the Rails app and forum are bridged together so they will share user info between the two databases. As well, the search feature in the header is something I really enjoyed creating. You can choose from a drop down list of different section that you want to submit your search to and the form will will return the proper output based on your query. Basically, you can choose to search between the blog, forum, resources, jobs, directory, and podcasts. Anyhow, the site should be live very soon and ready for feedback and blissful enjoyment. This is really just a teaser to whet your appetite, so hold out cause the real thing is coming shortly to a computer screen near you.