After talking with Pasha last night, I managed to further fine tune the picture of what I want to do with this new site Explorya.com which I will be devoting my entire time andd effort to for the next two years. It is a whole hearted commitment on my part to this idea I have been envisioning for the longest time. The first prototype (ThingsToDoSingapore.com) seemed be getting rather popular amongst the locals, as well as nationalities from multiple countries that frequent Singapore.
By November 2010, I will stop all commercial activites relating to providing customized IT solutions to external third parties as well as all social activites that does not lie in the path I decide to thread.
Now what is Exploray.com? Explorya.com aims to be a community platform that allows the easy sharing of location based information that will help make exploration fun and easy for travellers in various parts of the world. Being a natural extension to the original vision behind ThingsToDoSingapore.com, this platform will be one that is by the people for the people.
One of the main challenges which me and Pasha have identified is the presentation of information of various forms.Thus far these are the types of content objects we have identified:
- Bus stations
- Travel routes
- Accomodation Types
- Scam and Rip offs
- Border crossing procedures in remote parts of the world
With no intention to recreate the wheel, I started the initial prototype with the Joomla Content Management System with the use of the JomSocial component.
I envision that the various content objects will be described with the use of XML documents. A modular struture will be enforced. This will allow for easy system extension to accomodate more content object types as the platform progresses to later stages.
One of the main features for the content insertion process will be use wizards. The main intention behind this is to increase usuability for end users. I am currently pondering on how the use of XML could be used to provide a comprehensive description of a wizard content entry process.
A few months ago while I was less occupied, I did create a component for the Joomla 1.5 called the workflow component. It is somewhat similar. However due to sudden increase in commercial activites on my part, this project was left half baked and never released to the open source community. One of the main things I hope to accomplish now is to salvage chunks of the existing codes into this wizard engine I will be building for Explorya.com.
Thus far these are my thoughts which I will slowly make reality over the next few weeks.