A lot has happened since my October post announcing ProTalk, the secret project I am working on with my friend, Kim Rowan. So much in fact that now seems the ideal time to update you on our progress! Before I begin, Kim and I would like to say a HUGE thank you to all those who left comments on my original post, and all those at PfCongres and PHPNW 2011 who showed an interest and offered their ideas, suggestions and words of support. Both Kim and I were delighted with the response and we feel very encouraged that the PHP community is indeed going to find ProTalk to be the useful resource we hope it becomes.
Now, down to business! Since announcing the project in early October we have achieved the following project milestones:
Hosting
Combell very generously agreed to sponsor ProTalk with free hosting. Then they went the extra mile and covered the cost of registering the domain!
Domain
ProTalk is now registered as www.protalk.me. A temporary holding page is currently in place giving information on how to stay informed with ProTalk’s progress and shows a tantalizing glimpse of the ProTalk logo and design impression.
Design
Ibuildings very generously agreed to sponsor the design, logo and wireframes for our site. We will give a sneaky peek of the designs at a later date. Please follow us on twitter if you’d like to keep up-to-date!
ProTalk is now on Twitter! Please follow us @pro_talk. We would love to see you supporting the project by keeping in touch. Feel free to contact us by this method or by email (info [at] protalk [dot] me) if you have any suggestions or questions for us. ProTalk is a community initiative and we welcome your interest and input.
Development
We have decided to use Symfony 2 with a MySQL backend for the project. We opted for Symfony 2 because it is a first class PHP framework that is robust, reliable and will help us get up and running quickly. It also affords us the flexibility to scale up the site in the future. We are using Git as our version control application of choice and bitbucket.com to store our private repository for the time being. Should the need arise, we will use YUI3 to enhance UX.
Conclusion
I’m sure you will agree, we have been moving at quite a pace! Once again, we would like to thank everyone for their help, support and generosity thus far. We would also like to assure everyone who put forward ideas and suggestions that we listened closely and hope you will be pleased with the site when we go live in March / April next year!