My newest baby - you129.com

You129 is my personal project that I've been working on since, oh, say April. Needless to say, it took a lot of money, sweat (well, really finger cramps) and sleepless nights, but we finally got it up.

I am finally glad to announce the offical launch of our new site where we’ve integrated EE, Wordpress MU and Clip Share (video sharing CMS) into one neat little system. I give you, http://you129.com

Here is a brief technical breakdown of what we did: EE handles all of our main article content, as well as all three system’s member data and log-in synchronization; Wordpress MU functions just like Wordpress.com where users can create their own little blogs; and Clip Share is a video sharing system where you can upload videos.

This site took me about 5 months to do and I did all of the design and front-end development while a new buddy of mine I met in the EE forums, Jared Farrish, did all of the deep back-end integrations. Needless to say, this was one HECK of a project.

Jared actually created a cool EE extension and (in a nutshell…) pointed the other systems member management systems to EE. EE does all of the member management for all systems as we found that most of them shared the same member setup, username, password, email, etc.

Word Press Mu has some crazy code that we could tell wasn’t quite clean. In his words, “it was squirley”. It took him a good minute to crack it or at least got it to work right. Still working on syncing the Mu avatars with the EE avatars.

Clipshare is an interesting app that uses PHP and Smarty, but the Smarty modifications were quite a pain. It wasn’t that bad skinning, but it did take a good amount of work. According to Jared, Clipshare in all it’s incredible simplicity and quirkiness was actually quite easy to integrate in to EE via our extension. Especially when compared to WordPress Mu.

The part that drove us crazy about Clipshare was it’s installation. You have to install quite a few 3rd party apps on your server (thus you need to have a server with root access and preferably a dedicated server like Media Temple DV) and then have to configure them to clipshare. There is no install wizard like EE.

Read. Enjoy. Be inspired. http://you129.com

Filed in: Projects | Posted on: September 16, 2008 | (6) Comments → Add yours

Mario Outten
September 24, 2008

This is an amazing site! I found it on cssclip.com yesterday.

bryan
September 24, 2008

Did you utilize Expression Engine on this site? Just curious, there are some interesting elements to it that I like, but I’m wondering if they are possible in EE. Great work!

Bryan

grantmx
September 24, 2008

@Brian. I sure did use EE. Actually EE is the back bone of the site. It not only controls the general member management but it also controls the member management of the other two systems we used, Clip-Share (video) and WordPress Mu (blogs).

EE’s development structure was well organized and allowed us to hook all of these apps in to one functioning system.

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As a side note: I cant stand Wordpress and will soon be moving my site with a fresh design over to EE. Keep checking back guys!

Lafe Taylor
November 18, 2008

Grant,

This is one sweet site. Kudos to you and the developer. I love it.

If you don’t mind, sprinkle some of your design magic my way so that I may become an EE design Jedi such as yourself.

Marshall Grant
November 19, 2008

@ Lafe - your too funny. Thanks!

darrian
September 17, 2009

Nice summary. Even I could understand that Marshall. I’ll be praying for you and the family. I appreciate and value what you do man.

Darrian