Textpattern CMS

#1 2006-03-14 03:13:38

yacht_boy

New Member

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 2

Pro Bono design help needed for nonprofit

Hi all-

For lack of a better place to ask, I thought I’d post this here. I’m looking for free (no money) help for an existing site built in Textpattern. You are welcome to put a link to yourself in the footer and use the site in your portfolio. I’d like to accomplish several things—if people can only do one of them, a collaborative effort is fine.

Back story: I run a site that collects and distributes all the free textbooks I can find. It’s a fancy blog, I suppose, only it’s organized to be useful to people who would never consider reading a blog. I’m a college student, I’m dirt poor, and I know nothing about web design. Users of my site include other students, home schoolers, professors seeking to distribute their (free) books, and lots and lots of people in the developing world who can’t afford traditional textbooks. I don’t make any money off the site, nor do I intend to.

The site is www.textbookrevolution.org and it was built for me for free by a kind designer who put a ton of work into it. He did a great job, but the site is growing and he’s put more than his share of work into it and doesn’t want to get any more involved.

Take a look at the site. I like the color schemes and general layout, although you’re welcome to tinker if you’d like. What I want to change are organizational things. I want to

• improve the search capabilities
• add support for unlimited tagging
• switch out the category list for a tagcloud or a system of subcategories (so that someone looking for math books can drill down to books that are algebra or calculus or geometry)
• make it so that all tags related to an article are linked with each article
• change the presentation of the articles so that people see a brief two-line summary of the book, not the entire article. I expect this could be done using the excerpt field, but I don’t know how.
• improve the RSS so that people can subscribe to just one tag, multiple tags, or the whole site
• generally make the site easier to use and a little bit prettier.

If you’re interested, shoot me a form email, reply to the topic, or skype me at yacht_boy. Again, you don’t have to be capable of doing everything in the list, but I do ask that you finish what you start in a timely manner (been burned in the past).

Thanks in advance!

Jason

#2 2006-03-14 19:59:44

alexandra

Member

From: Cologne, Germany

Registered: 2004-04-02

Posts: 1,370

Re: Pro Bono design help needed for nonprofit

Hi Jason, i can help you with the excerpts. Tagging is another story. There is a plugin out which you can use for tagging. The disadvantage of the plugin is, it performes many requests to the database and that slows down the sites loading. A second tagging plugin by wilshierone is not finished/not working :( yet.

Which txp version your site is running on?

#3 2006-03-14 21:43:41

yacht_boy

New Member

Registered: 2006-03-14

Posts: 2

Re: Pro Bono design help needed for nonprofit

Alexandra-

Thanks for the offer. I’m running 4.0.2. I’ll send you an email.

Jason