It's almost exactly two years since I started working with Netmums.
For those who don't know them, Netmums are a group of mums who set about helping each other through the power of the Internet. With very little technical knowledge themselves they've managed to built Netmums up into a huge website with over 300,000 members and roughly 1.5 million pageviews each week.
A few weeks ago, in the midst of manic work on ORG's e-voting report, I was also developing the final stages of Netmums' new site. The new site is a complete revamp including fresh design (by an outside agency) and shifting all of Netmums membership data and content from custom PHP scripts and phpBB to Swing Digital's Content Management System and vBulletin.
The CMS still needed significant chunks of custom code to support the Netmums model of localised boards and listings. And we had to do several trial imports of the massive 'Coffeehouse' bulletin board system, which took hours to process.
When it came to launching Netmums members were very vocal on what they did and didn't like. So we've been tweaking things here and there whilst working on the new features that this change has enabled.
It's been incredibly exciting and very rewarding to see the biggest install yet for Swing Digital's software particularly given the good work Netmums do.
Jason Kitcat 