Community Sites
O.K. the evil plan is to wrest control of the current developer site from the marketing types who bizarrely control it and bring it in-house to engineering. Afterall we know best eh?
Which lead me to play around with two community/forum portal-thingies Drupal and Plone. Now Drupal is Apache/PHP/MySQL (the AMP in LAMP) while Plone is based on Python/Zope/ZopeCM. Now I did some reading and some playing and the result is: I really, really like Drupal. Sure it's not the most extensive content-management system out there, but it's really, really easy to get a basic community site up and running.
The main drawback of Plone is allegedly one of its main strengths - it's solid foundation on Zope and Python. While this is probably undoubtedly a good thing [tm], my tiny mind and even tinier attention span - just frankly isn't going to go there. PHP/HTML I can stomach.
The other thing about Plone is that it's actually quite infuriating to use. Drupal by comparison is a breeze. It's simple and it makes sense. Plus it has a very vibrant developer community.
posted by Fergal @ 12:16 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Hey Ferg --
one tip: don't over-structure. What we've found works really well is just the basics: a wiki, 2 mailing lists, an RSS feed from the wiki's recentchanges page, and that's about it.
If you over-structure, you wind up with a whole load of structural stuff (workflow, "this info doesn't go on this page", "login required", "only user foo has permission to do that") etc. getting in the way of people actually _using_ it to collaborate. The wiki gets around all of that horribleness and allows people to use it.
I can throw you over some good URLs about wikifying and opening up proprietary product-dev processes to outsiders if you like.
ah why not anyway. ;)
my notes on wikifying: http://taint.org/2004/10/08/081409a.html
Sun's tips on opening:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris?entry=opensolaris_lessons_learned
Fergal,
If you wanted a conversation between two people, why don't you pick up the voi(p)n?
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