MonroeTalks.com
MonroeTalks.com - I still remember walking away from the Publishers office with my head spinning.. she had an idea to create a community website for Monroe County, and suggested we launch it in the next 6 months. With a lot of research, an amazing team of managers and employees - we were able to make it happen.
MonroeTalks offers registered users a place to discuss anything and everything about Monroe County, or, whatever they’d like. Users can also create their own photo gallery as well as post events to the calendar. The topics of discussions are still displayed on monroenews.com, in the top right sidebar.
How was it built? I started looking around at other community websites in the beginning of research, and stumbled upon the wonderful world of Drupal. Drupal is an open source (free) software that allows users to build a community website. We specifically really studied ModestoFamous, a community site built soley on the Drupal platform.
For the photos we first decided to use another open source software, Gallery2. The problem the developer was having was merging the two systems together, he was having a tough time with it, and the gallery just didn’t look as good as we imagined. A month before launch, we switched to another open source photo gallery software called Coppermine, which has proved to be much more flexible for the developer to work with and a lot more user friendly for users.
The forums are utilizing Simple Machine Forums, which are much more robust than most forum systems out there.. also open source!
We weren’t really thrilled with the calendar system that Drupal had to offer, and were really struggling with a solution. A few weeks before launch, I was reading an article that our Publisher had passed along to me, about Pittsburgh Live. I checked the site out and found they were using a calendar system called Helios. Helios, for a single licence costs $149, which isn’t bad for the amount of options it offers, including a reverse publishing feature already built in.
What’s next? I think we’ll find out what users have to say. The response to the site so far has been good. The first day we received well over 3000 unique visitors. If you have any ideas for future development, please submit some ideas - we look forward to hearing from you!
A big thanks goes out to everyone that helped make this project a success! We really put John (codemonkey) through the ringer on this project, and he’s still with us, so that’s a good thing. 
Check it out, and let us know what you think! MonroeTalks.com
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