Dragonfly Connects

by: Simon Hughes
date: Monday, Mar 30, 2020
category: dragonflyconnects dragonfly freelance

I have been working with Dragonfly for a few months now on the design for their platform for freelancers. As a platform they have a fantastic roadmap of features they wish to build and a forum for freelancers was high on the list.

Given the current situation with Covid-19, and the massive shift to remote working, the team at Dragonfly felt their would be a huge demand right now for support for freelancers, contractors and small businesses. The ask was can we get something up and running inside a week but ensure that it will continue to work for the longterm for the business. Key to forums are users, registration, and finding a forum platform that would allow us to easily integrate into our wider estate was a key driver in our choice of technology.

There are plenty of open source software platforms for creating forums, including PHPBB, NodeBB, MyBB, alongside wider content management systems (CMS) with forum plug-ins. I performed a quick scan on the market to see which platforms would best suit our needs, and there was one clear winner, NodeBB. NodeBB has only existed for a few years so is written in a much cleaner way than some of the other platforms and supports OAuth out of the box enabling us to easily extend the authentication into the wider Dragonfly platform.

After some discussions and a quick demo of the NodeBB platform, we decided to proceed with it. Following the Dragonfly ethos of supporting freelancers, we engaged some freelancers to help us deploy the platform into AWS with the database deployed on MongoDb cloud. All the branding and content was created by freelancers and the clients challenging brief and timescales was met.

The Dragonfly Connects platform is now up and running, why not take a look and participant in the conversations at Dragonfly Connects