Alright, I've largely settled into the backend needs and high level design for most of the site so it's time to do a check on another suggestion. Making the site open source, I'm not opposed to this, but as with the community articles I would want at least some commitment before I post the code somewhere. Heartbleed and other recent issues should highlight some of the issues with open source, but frankly there's about three places that need security on the site and I'd take all the help I can get with anti-spam and other measures. So, if I get some hands up from people who are already familiar with the tech I'll do the extra setup involved, otherwise I'll get cracking in about two weeks.

Backend Tech I'm talking about, C#, MSSQL, most likely featuring entity framework, MVC and Linq. Honestly the last three are resume padding and not that difficult to get your mind around, so the using C# for web development and MSSQL would be helpful backend. Frontend is most likely going to be jQuery with some more recent CSS and HTML. Very much open to UI design suggestions even if you don't know your ass from your elbow in terms of website design, but I have a core of ideas to work.

The other big decision I'll need to make prior to putting the new site anywhere live is the host. I have a contender but I'm still wide open to suggestion. I'd need .Net hosting for asp.net 4.5 and MVC, a few gigs of available database space and a significant amount of bandwidth. Let me know if anyone has good or bad experiences with a given host.

As a note, I'm going to be a tad busy the next two weeks so I likely won't have time to do another post till after the 4th. But when I do it'll involve something to do with actual development of the site.