Hey all,

As the title suggests, I have been tasked (along with a friend) by a national charity, with creating a website that will hopefully be used by hundreds of thousands of people across the country over the coming months. This job was originally tasked to a major firm but they backed away at the last minute and now we must step in to save the day! The charity had free credit with the firm that was supposed to do it, but we are doing this pro bono (the friend is an employee of the charity and I’m just a big supporter).

Basically, the timeline is that we have from Monday until Sunday (I realize that is actually 7 days but the weekend is just overflow time) to build the back-end for this site (luckily the design is already put together). This will leave two weeks for error checking and debugging, and for getting the multi-lingual content online.

The purpose of the site is to host an initiative that let's artists create a profile about themselves, and then upload a song. Users are able to sign on to the website to vote for their favourite songs. The top 10 user-voted songs will be narrowed down to a final 3 by a panel of judges. These 3 songs will be included on a CD that will also have unique songs by internationally recognizable artists. The dual purpose of this initiative is to raise funds for the charity, and to increase its contact list.

The reason I am posting this is two-fold. First, I thought you might all be interested and amused by the shear madness of what we hope to do.
The second reason is that I hoped that you could suggest some open-source (or at leat relatively cheap) platforms that we can use as a base for this project. The reality is that with such a short time frame to do this in, whatever pre-existing tools we can use the better!

We have looked at:

• http://www.phpmembers.com/ (user management)
• http://elgg.org/ (open source social media platform)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Have you considered looking at Drupal? It has social networking features, membership, file upload, and some voiting support.

See.

http://drupal.org/

and

http://drupal.org/project/vote_up_down

I second that, Drupal is outstanding.. Also, if you're really looking to cut time you can use Joomla.. I've used it for 5-6 years and there are about a billion plugins hahah.. I have a site www.MyPraize.com that actually has that same exact functionality, it's not a hard setup on Joomla

Thank you very much.

Drupal is brilliant but you don't have enough time to go through the learning curve