That's a wonderful idea and I am glad someone is taking another stab at this!
FYI we have been trying to do such a thing, and called it MechDB. It is available on mechdb.net but didn't really take off since I partnered with a guy on this project whose role was to bring in content but he unfortunately couldn't deliver due to his personal life.
First things first, I have been a web dev for 10+ years and can take care of the development if you are willing to iterate on the existing codebase. It is a full JS stack, running Nuxt which is a web framework based on Vue (for the front end components) that takes care of the server-side rendering (for SEO). Database is MongoDB. Quite modern and robust stack, much more customizable than Wordpress. Also I am in the process of starting a
keyboard-related project and the company will assume the hosting costs to make the data available for free to anyone.
So that's two things off your plate already!
If you are interested, here are a few things you should know:
- The website has been originally made to cover all sort of "datasets", meaning not only keycaps but also keyboards and I have code ready for other things such as switches, plates, pcbs and all. Now if it feels wrong to you, I may also just remove all the other stuff and focus on keycaps (which makes sense since I am starting a keycaps business too)
- It was made to be community-driven, so accept contributions. I won't go too deep into details about what and how this would happen, just know that all content is being input by website users (after registration) and there is a built-in possibility to review edits. "Verified" users can post directly without validation, and can also approve/deny other edits made by "unverified users". Verifying users is made by a few selected admins only. We had concerns about people messing up the DB so this mechanism is already in place. Also if you subscribe now you are verified automatically, if you want to give it a try. Note that this system can of course be modified to suit what you guys think is better.
- The codebase is on github and can be open to contributors/maintainers, a few people have already contributed in the past but I closed it until I know what will happen with this project.
There are three things that were in the works (but coding got frozen on the way):
1. Creating and documenting an API so that other websites can use this data to create new cool projects
2. Make it into a pcpartpicker kind of thing where one can pick some parts to make a build (this could be split out in a side project with the proper API)
3. Having a gallery of images posted online (there is a draft if you click in the "Gallery" header menu, all the automatic import has been done, but the front is really just a placeholder)
I have zero design skills so your help as a designer to make this look better would be awesome! Also I am now lacking content but if we focus on the keycaps only this will probably make it easier... We might have been too ambitious...
Happy to hear your thoughts about all this and I hope this project will come to life again!