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.
Getting Things Done has been great for my business needs and personal goals. I have always strived to get more organized than I am, and GTD has allowed me to take that next step and kick it into high gear. On top of that, the folks at David Allen, from DA down, are good people that are doing good things in the world.
Thanks for your kind words, Tyler. I’ve seen David, as a public figure, take flak just for being who he is. And some of it rolls down to the staff as well. So it’s really always nice to remember that this work does, in fact, change people’s lives, and that people really do appreciate it. Hopefully GTD Connect will prove to be a valuable extension of this good work into more people’s lives.
Just a p.s. to say we recently launched the “2.0″ version of GTD Connect. Some of the features of the new GTD Connect include:
[*] Completely redesigned site structure and navigation for a more intuitive browsing experience
[*] Completely redesigned look-and-feel incorporating an open, modular layout
[*] New features such as GTD-Q to offer interactive coaching
[*] A My GTD Solutions module which uses your member profile as the basis for customized recommendations
[*] Widely cross-referenced media displayed in a variety of paradigms, including tags/topics, categories, via search, and in special features areas
[*] A standards-compliant design which offers greater accessibility and compatibility across a wider range of browser types, including text-only browsers and the mobile web
Kudos to the team for their remarkable effort!