I think you should bring in more developers to manage the asset. You cant manage everything on your own. I'm currently volunteering for like 3 projects so it might not necessarily be me, but for example if I was helping I could storm a tonne of ideas, Id be happy volunteer at least one session to take a load off your shoulders.

First thing:

I'll start with a controversial one first, Personally I think Joomla would be a better content management fit than wordpress for a few reasons, mostly because of its orientation toward a Document Management solution as opposed to blog. Although wordpress has a million customisations can and is currently configured as a CMS solution, it is not the best fit. In my opinion Joomla has a greater range of extensions that will be useful for long term progression.

Wordpress is your ideal blog + extension solution
Joomla is your ideal content management + extension solution.

I'm pretty sure TZM main site works on Joomla. I dont see why we wouldn't just copy a dump of their entire joomla install and alter it to Australian needs, it might be worth asking about an image of their server.

However, any way we look at this, it is a massive job to consider this and your obviously volunteering a massive amount of time already. I'll put some others down too.

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Now to some easier ones:

1) Change the forum to white background. I think except for gaming circles its been voted white is preferred.

2) PHPBB has a more widely known interface for a forum. If you want to use PressBB then we should just make a few tweaks to make it more farmiliar. The first of which the ability to set a password up at registration, so people who arn't forum experts wont need to entertain complicated password change procedures.

Also, you currently have a glitch with your registration, id need to debug but i think if you register with the same username as somebody else it breaks, or something.

3)Redesign. The design isnt great, but thats probably not your main issue. the most important thing is a fluid CSS layout which looks better on a wider resolution. Your wordpress blog uses 800X resolution which is less then 10% of users which is boring. Having a fluid layout with min/max means you get the best of both words with small monitors seeing a small page and big ones seeing a big page.

I can understand you will probably tell me no shit and this is volunteer work, I'm just calling it as i see it.

4) Graphics, redressing point 3, you could probably just install a template for wordpress or joomla that is later than 06/2009. You dont need to do anything and you get the latest technology for a site.

5) This one is the most important Contingency for mass marketing of ZM/TVP in Australia - The server gets 10k+ concurrent users.

We need to bring together a team of developers who have experience with 10k+ load concurrent users on Apache server builds.

YWe need to design a special independent web site, different to this one, which will be the one people see in this case.

Have you ever seen a web site address on today tonight or another prime time show, and when you check it you get a server load error from Apache?

To gain 10000-200000 qualified leads in pay per click you are talking about losing $2,000 to $100,000 dollars worth of marketing here if your server cant meet demand.

Now obviously this would cost big bucks, which is why you either register a seperate domain which you temporarily put on somebody's expensive dedicated server rack temporarily during public realses, or we even switch over the DNS allocation 24 hours under the same domain.

But the main thing is your have a page on stand by READY TO GO incase something happens. I was reading people at the moment are lobbying for SBS. You might only have a few thousand there but even that would most definitely crash this server.

This is OUR responsibility as the technical guys... to have a working site so that if 50k-200k people ever need to see the site they can. If they see a white page they may never come back.

Not sure if you have much apache admin on top of your programming skills, but in addition to caching tools you can also deliver your php more efficiently using Opcode, etc.

However, in light of the fact there is no budget, I thought we could just simplify to presentation form in HTML, minimal image work and minimal html/css elements. We then utilise HTML site on a Lite Apache build with minimal overheads per thread request, disabling all unnecessary functions, with the 24 hour to 1 week time requirement billed out at a small cost to the organisation or hopefully donated through networking.

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It might be interesting to ask PJ whether in fact his server could be used for mass marketing rather than ours and what additional load he has contingencies for, and whether there is any dynamic resources management activated on demand where he has it hosted.

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Um, cant really think of much else, other than maybe you get a lot of extra content creators or social content creation structure going. I'll have a look around next time I'm here and continue the storm.

Um, in my opinion, whether or not to use wordpress or joomla should probably be treated seperately to the issue of massive server load, ie. 10,000+ users.

Either one can be optimised for speed.

The reason is that whether its Wordpress or Joomla, you generally have a framework that caches the PHP based mysql database requests to HTML, so that your apache server is only having to call HTML pages so long as nothing has changed.

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What i meant was, which ever way we are in the long term, we can actually setup a different hosting environment and have a team on stand by to deal with big time events. When you have a Joomla/WP, you still have some marginal load on the server for a few reasons... and considering we are running our budget on a shoe string we could develop a low cost contingency for such an event.

At the very least make some marginal adjustments to the administration of WP or Joomla so they are optimised.

I dont see this situation happening for a while, I think the best thing to do is get several of ZM Australians tech guys, could be you, me, and some others. And to meet with some international tech guys from ZM main with VOIP. We might come up with a shared resources strategy for all the worlds ZM chapters, where say for example US server resources are used in this event. In fact such a strategy might already exists.

Need some team work on this one for sure. We can also ask them about a copy of their Joomla install for our chapter, and recommend that this be a world wide practise. It makes sense so all the chapters have consistency.