Just came across this post. I really like the fact that colourlovers.com has managed to create a very passionate community. Look at the sponsors post..tons of people commenting that they would like to be a sponsor (for very few benefits IMO)
I’m not sure if it’s the ‘artists’ mentality that does it or the fact it’s just extremely well done. It has all the normal components of a community/social site but the secret ingredient may be the nature of the content.
It’s a product of the skill and creativity of all those individuals. Using each others ideas and work to create new things. It’s not exactly collaboration but mutual respect and competition. It’s not competition either. It’s joy, participation and showing off.
Whatever it is it just plain works well.
Wow, you weren’t kidding, that is one fantastic social setup. Now I’m really curious what software base they are using. Everything is tied together so perfectly, even the theme is beautiful, and very fitting for the site.
My guess would be that this was created using Drupal…
Very nice, but certainly something BuddyPress is very capable of producing.
Some people are starting to realize this now, but most of the power of BuddyPress is in the theme. You can really highly customize your installation if you know WP/BP theme tags and structure.
You’d need to write some custom components to handle the color objects, but that would not be at all difficult.
Great site though, an excellent example of a community built around a solid niche.
While nowhere near as fancy as that site I have come across a couple of others.
http://www.airshowbuzz.com/ basically it’s just a photo/video sharing site focused on military planes.
One of my favorites is http://community.beliefnet.com/
While the layout is a bit of a mess imho, the functionality of this site never ceases to amaze me. You can seriously spend weeks digging through the beliefnet network as there is so much content.
Their blog portion http://www.beliefnet.com is actually layed out pretty well considering how many blogs they have. By using categories/subcategories for all blogs, along with ‘featured bloggers’ I have never had a hard time finding what I am looking for.
Well from the http://www.colourlovers.com/about page:
//// Server Technologies We Love & Use
:: Red Hat Linux
:: CentOS
:: Apache HTTP Server
:: MySQL RDBMS
:: PHP: Hypertext Processor
:: memcached
:: Alternative PHP Cache
:: Munin Monitoring Tool
:: WordPress
Notice the last item…
CL is not a new site, so wo’nt be BP
