Hello Everyone!
I first want to thank all of those who are helping us beta test the 2.0 version of our community. We are now at a stable point, and any data being put up there will stay.
I hope that everyone who has been beta-testing has enjoyed the new site so far. I know the look is kind-of drab, but I’m not a designer and so can’t do much about that… eventually we will hire a designer and prettify our site (or should I say manlify?) But for the moment, this works. I’ll be updating look and feel whenever I think it impacts functionality.. but other than that… can’t promise much for the look.
As for develpment of features and functions, I can say that we are looking forward to some cool new features soon as BuddyPress, the platform our network is built on, is expecting some cool update coming sometime in december. Here are some things we can look forward to:
Activity Streams:
- Activity stream threaded commenting (like the facebook wall).
Blogs:
- A quick blog post form via the theme. (Will allow you to post to your personal blog very quickly)
Core:
- Basic privacy controls for user profiles and content contained within an installation (some much needed privacy controls)
- Inappropriate content flagging (let us admin know when Spammer show up)
Friends:
- Bulk accept/reject friendship requests
Taken directly from their development roadmap here: http://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/
Other Things We Need NOT included with Buddypress:
1) Chat – Chat is of vital importance to our community and we really need to get a viable chat solution before we can officially go live with the new version of our site. I believe the chat script best suited to our needs is CometChat, located here: http://www.cometchat.com – Cost 49$
This is probably the most important of our needs.
2) Supporter Features – We really need a way for our users to support us on an on-going basis if we are to stay fresh and reach our potential to grow our community and get our message out. This will eventually solve some of our initial slow down due to financing the development of this site. In order for us to add supporter features we need to pay for some professionally developed plugins for WordpressMU. Cost 79$
Note: This 79$ will also get us some updated themes and other features for users.
3) We need a much more robust Photo Album feature – We can get this one of two ways. Either hire a developer and do it ourselves or stick with what we have and wait until this in added to BuddyPress (it’s in the roadmap for 1.5, which is likely 6-8mths away). Cost Unknown/free.
This is not vital to the functionality of our site as we have functional photo albums now. They just have a few problems and won’t really scale too well as our site grows.
4) I can’t think of any other features that will cost us money to add, but there are some other things that Myself and the Admin Team are or will be working on soon.
-Video How-To Guide for entire site
-Support Ticket System for trouble shooting your blog
-A Wonderful Front page that educates would be restorers about our community
-Privacy Features
-An Lenghy well-reseached Ebook on our topic that we will sell to raise capital and drive traffic to our site
-E-Commerce Store
-Custom Modules for things like a Restoration Log/Journal
-Much More…
So for now we have a total need of :
128$ in Donations Needed
If you are inclined to donate, please see the “Support our development” Tab on the Right hand side of the site —->>>
Note – We will be extending Supporter privileges to any donating members, and I’ve also kept records of those who have donated in the past and will extend those benefits to them as well. (haven’t quite worked out what all these features will be, but I promise they will be cool. 
One Final Note: We need to see how well our site scales with more traffic and people using it. So I'm opening up the Beta Testing to everyone here, instead of just special invites.
To sign up please visit http://www.MFCommunity.org and click "Sign Up" - Please realize that this is still in Beta (meaning it's not done yet and we are aware of most issues). If you encounter any problems or something on the site doesn't work for you, please post a new topic in the Beta-Testers Group.