Mickey Kay Engineering Leader & Coach

I'm a WordPress developer (plugin and theme author, WordCamp speaker, etc), so I'm somewhat biased, but WordPress gives you need to build a user/profile site like about.me.

Out of the box, WordPress ships with an easily customizable user API with different role and capability levels. By default, meta information like name, email, short bio, etc are associated with each user. With some pretty simple development, you can add custom meta information of your own. Once you have your user configuration set up, it's pretty simple to output these users and their associated info in any number of ways, including as an all-inclusive directory and as single-user profile pages.

There are certainly other details you'll want to consider, and it would be good to know more about any specific design and/or functional specs you have, but I'd say WordPress would be an easy fit for this one.

Happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Hi there,

Great question - one that warrants several possible answers.

I work as lead developer at a web studio where we often need to obtain assets (videos, large images, etc) from our clients. Regardless of whether or not Squarespace offers the functionality you're describing (which I don't think it does: http://answers.squarespace.com/questions/1284/must-videos-be-externally-hosted-elsewhere-even-with-a-paid-account), I would typically recommend against allowing direct uploads for potentially massive files directly via your site.

For one, it'll eat up your bandwidth very rapidly. Even if you have a hosting plan that allows for great monthly data transfer limits, or lack thereof, there's really no great reason to take this burden on yourself.

Secondly, you'll eat up your storage. Depending on the size of the videos you're exchanging, the file size could easily run into gigabyte territory very quickly, and at some point down the road you'll likely run into the issue of how to store all those large files.

So what do I recommend? We typically use a third party service like Dropbox or Box, and that has worked very well for us thus far. These services are completely optimized to do one thing and to do it very well: transfer and store files.

The plus sides:
- Optimized for massive transfers
- Very secure
- Each client can set up their own account (or you can do this for them) and simply share folders/files with you - this allows for simple organization and separation per client

Anyhow, loads more reasons out there, but this is a basic summary. Let me know if you have any questions and I'd be happy to help.

All the best,
Mickey

Hi there,

I see you still don't have an answer on this one and am wondering if more info might help. You say you're not enjoying PHP - is there another environment/language you prefer?

Furthermore, I am hesitant to answer this question because WooCommerce is such a fully fleshed out, well-supported system that it's hard to envision coding an alternate solution from scratch as opposed to just creating custom plugin functionality to do what you want. Have you considered this possibility (it would necessitate the PHP route)?

Have you tried the Titanium support desk? It seems like that might be a good place for this question if you haven't posed it already:
https://my.appcelerator.com/auth/login?redirect_to=http%3A%2F%2Fsupport.appcelerator.com%2F

This is a great question, and my best Googling / Amazon-searching efforts aren't turning up much. Maybe time to write that book :)

After considering this one for a bit, I can also imagine why this would be a tough book to write. With browser technology iterating relatively quickly, and with new CSS features continuously developing, any resource that dives into specifics (specific browsers, specific features, specific issues, etc) would inevitably be out of date within a matter of years, if not months. This isn't to say there can't be great resources on designing across browsers, just that talking specifics can pose a unique challenge (although perhaps great incentive to release new editions of the book each year!).

That said, here are some resources that I've found helpful and somewhat timeless in their advice. Some are more general in their discussion of best practices and considerations, while others are more specifically issue- or browser- related.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/07/the-principles-of-cross-browser-css-coding/
Smashing Magazine (June 2010) - a great article that covers general approaches to creating CSS/HTML to work across browsers as best as possible - an oldie but goodie.

https://www.modern.ie/en-us/category/code-with-standards
Internet Explorer (November 2013) - somewhat ironically, Internet Explorer has a great article on fundamental best practices for ensuring you have to do as little browser troubleshooting as possible late in the game.

http://css-tricks.com/search-results/?q=cross+browser
CSS Tricks (search archive) - when I have a CSS issue I'll often turn to CSS Tricks. If you want a good overview of general cross-browser issues to watch out for, this search results page gives a good top-level perspective.

Like I said, there are lots of great articles out there covering all the issues and solutions surrounding something like IE8, but they'll be somewhat irrelevant in the coming years (e.g. https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/cross-browser-development-tips-css).

So no book recommendation, alas. Hopefully some of these links might be helpful. If not, I'm serious about writing that book :)