I have been working with a company called Splayback (http://splayback.com/) for close to four or five months now, and unfortunately was not able to choose the CMS that they were building on top of. Previously, they were sold a CMS called Sharemixer (http://www.sharemixer.com/setup-software) for over $1000 from a company called Esultants (http://www.esultants.com/). It was originally setup with a, quite honestly, painful template. Their video upload utility is, well, painful (it randomly drops connection and just hangs), and their web hosting would shut down for about 4 or 5 hours at least once a month.

Needless to say, this is problematic. In short, don’t use this software. Compared to its competitors, it is overpriced, and they nickel and dime you on everything. For example, the software uses ffmpeg and a number of other underlying opensource video libraries. They attempt to sell you software to install these libraries (http://www.sharemixer.com/setup-software). Talk about crappy service! For over $1000 for the core product, installation should be provided!

Anyways, we are considering switching web hosting to vps.net soon and, in the meantime, are just trying to get a fundraising system built in order to begin working with schools. It is exciting.

Now, I don’t want to be all negative on Sharemixer. It does do some things right. It uses smarty templates, so it was pretty easy to upgrade the template (had my team get something together in just a couple weeks). It uses PHP/MySQL and lets you know what video libraries to install, so we should not have any trouble moving to a VPS and expanding as needed. It does support most video formats, though its verbiage on every page needs to be changed (was meant for an adult site… had to modify the verbiage to fit a site for youth). All in all, we’ve made it work, but it would have been faster to use a more developed, cleaner system. See my other articles on related subjects and you’ll find a couple other video systems that are far more robust.

In short, here is what I have had developed for them (on top of Sharemixer):

1. An organization management system that links organizations/schools to categories
2. A fundraising system where each organization can have a number of fundraising groups (ex: different sports programs) and each group can have a number of kids.
3. Kids can raise fundraising support and a decent portion is given back to the school.
4. developing: automated online registration system with videos and the ability for kids to tag themselves in videos and for supporters to subscribe to weekly email updates on what videos the athletes were tagged in.
5. developing: fully integrated ticketing system
6. (and we did other things, but this is the revenue-generating portion)