Field of Dreams

Dad Squad was an idea originally thought of by Mums. Dad Squad's sister site, MumChat (http://mumchat.net), is a discussion board run by Mums for Mums which I do the technical work for, and it has been a wonderful, sanity-saving place for my wife Allison to hang out and talk about life and make new friends with other Mums. The Mums of MumChat found their partners asking why there wasn't a board for Dads... which is where the idea came from!

After the idea was suggested to me, I did a bit of searching and came up with not much at all in the way of community sites for Dads... so I decided to start one up.

I'm working on the "Field of Dreams" methodology... "Build it and they will come"... so I'll just keep adding content to the site, and slowly start promoting it as it fills up with content. Hopefully some like-minded Dads will join me along the way and we can build up a busy little community!

Technically, the main site runs on Drupal (http://drupal.org), which is a brilliant open-source content management (CMS) system. I have written my own themes for it, based originally off the Zen theme but modified way beyond recognition. The discussion boards use software called SMF from SimpleMachines (http://simplemachines.org). Again, extensively modified so it integrates well with the rest of Dad Squad. I've also modified SMF so it is "multi-site" - basically I've got it set up so I can run MumChat and DadSquad from the same code base and database, but have different themes and different security (basically two separate boards, but with some boards shared based off member group security).

If anybody would like a copy of the work I've done on the Drupal or SMF themes, please let me know (via the main contact page). It isn't in a state I could release it to the open source community as a package (lots of hard-coded stuff), but I'd be happy to share it if anybody wants to wade through the code themselves.

Welcome, hope to see you in the discussion boards soon!

Brent