BoltWire Site Update...

[Dan Vis]

Hi Everyone!

It's been awhile since I've updated BoltWire, but development continues to race forward, especially with the modules and plugins. I hope to release verse 8.xx sometime soon. It's not a major upgrade but does involve some unusual changes--thus the new version number. On the other hand, version 7 works quite well, so there's no rush on this.

Today I spent a few hours reworking the website. I'm just too busy on my site (almost 18000 students) to manage a separate blog and forum here, so I've eliminated those sections and will simply be resorting to our mail list here (at googlegroups) for community functions. I've also decided against running a hosting service for the same reason. I'm serving a couple clients who have ministries I support, but can't even manage those as well as I'd like. So there's no way I can take on additional clients.

To help keep BoltWire financially viable I've decided on a simpler route. First, I'm going to start making our pro modules available for a small donation (like $10each, or $99 for the whole package). And second, I'm going to throw in our Launch Accelerator course for free, for anyone who gets the whole package. I'm not quite ready to offer those yet, but the site is set up for that and I hope to turn that on fairly soon. Those funds will help cover the cost of documentation and development.

I was motivated to work on this by one of our longstanding members who was asking about the future of BoltWire. And it got me thinking it might be worth taking another stab at interjecting our software into the marketplace of open source software ideas. If anyone has any ideas about how to jumpstart our community and attract new developers, please let me know. I think a project like this is difficult--no matter how good the software--when you are competing against massive platforms like wordpress. Still, I definitely think we bring something unique to the table...

Anyway, just checking in. Feel free to offer comments about the site upgrade. Nothing major, but I think it is more functional given where things stand.

Cheers,

Dan