Shishkablog - Project

Hey guys and gals,

A bunch of friends and myself have started a large-scale project. It's basically a massive artist community that will include forums, and members will be able to post in their journals and such. The whole thing is in planning still (frontend's design, which I am doing, is almost complete), but here's the rough-edge of our ideas as yet.

+ Custom forums - nothing huge... just a couple of forums and the ability to post threads and reply to the threads themselves. We won't be needing the private messaging system, so it'll be a very modded down version of most forums.
+User login - Users able to register and such. This should be easy.
+ Massive Backend - All of us know HTML (and I know my way around PHP pretty well) so we can edit everything fine, but for sake of not wanting to do that, we'll need a backend where we can edit major bodies of information and control user activities.
+ User activities - Users will be able to post journals, post artwork, and other things (TBD).
+ And some more minor stuff that'll be really easy.

Big project, no? Right now, most of us who are working on it are doing it for free because we're all good friends. But no, I'm not asking you to do it for free. We'll all pitch in for you, but I doubt we'll be able to raise anything over $200 for you to work on this. However, this project has it's upside in that when (and I say when because I know it will with all the wicked ideas we've been coming up with lately) it launches, you'll be getting a whole lot more attention and more possible clients.

Please feel free to contact me for questions (won't look back here) at:
costa.james [at] gmail.com

Cheers,

James

Have you looked at/considered the various open source CMS's available to give you a foundation? Then you would just need to hack on the parts you want to customize - rather then building it from scratch.