Well, after months of development and noodling, we pushed Faded & Blurred 2.0 live yesterday. It’s been a really wonderful process building this site. Though this site is for the users, the actual building of it was sort of a personal challenge. This site is built on a Joomla backend, and up until a couple months ago, I didn’t really even know what Joomla was. I knew of it, but had never really looked into it. When I was researching how to add a social networking component to the new version of F&B, I read through several web development blogs, many of which sung the praises of using Joomla. Looking into it, I found that it seemed to fit our needs moving forward. It’s modular, scalable and has a fantastic worldwide development community that are often more than willing to answer questions, even provide code snippets. I talked it over with Frank and Nikki, who asked if I knew Joomla. “No”, I responded “but I will.” I think they were a little hesitant, but they said go for it. So we started pouring over sites like Model Mayhem, Supershoots, DP Review and even Facebook and MySpace, trying to come up with a list of features that we wanted to integrate into F&B 2. At the same time, I began researching Joomla. I started reading books, blog posts and forum discussions, trying to wrap my head around Joomla’s rather different way of doing things. Monday, all of it came together and we released 2.0 into the wild. It’s a huge improvement over our initial site, offering discussion forums, social networking and bookmarking, twitter integration and a lot more. Also, we’ve made a commitment to trying to make F&B more of a destination site for photographers and image makers. We’ve got features, reviews, and some great interviews lined up with some of the most creative and interesting people we can find. We don’t know exactly where it’s going, but hey, part of the fun is just hanging on and enjoying the ride.

See for yourself at: http://fadedandblurred.com