GTD® Connect

David Allen’s GTD Connect membership program is finally live to the public. GTD Connect includes an amazing web site with tons of rich content, events, and interactive applications to keep members engaged with maximum productivity and cutting-edge ideas and tools. This is stuff everyone needs to keep up in the world of information overload. Just not everyone knows it yet.

I spent over 18 months architecting the system, from dedicated hardware to software including eCommerce, CRM, subscription management, recurring billing, and content management systems. I had great help from a small, dedicated, and very talented in-house team of artists and programmers. Absolutely everything is implemented on a LAMP stack.

As such, it represents a culmination of many of the enterprise best practices for PHP, MySQL, and Linux that I have discussed over the years here on my blog, including: Design Patterns and object oriented code, Pear packages, a dash of Ajax, a lot of Security measures and some cryptography, lots of optimization, a powerful and scalable LAMP web server farm monitored by cacti, coding standards; all managed using a few extreme programming tactics, built around best-of-breed eCommerce packages, and with a robust mail queue mechanism delivering countless emails per day.

I consider it a kind of real-world treatise on how to effectively implement enterprise best practices with LAMP technologies. No books, no debating, no theory–we did it. And eager new members are already rolling in. Hats off to the team at David Allen Company. Good times ahead.