Web Committee Meeting | Thursday 8/31 1:30 PM

Espresso, Alan and I will be meeting tomorrow at 1:30 at my house in Amida to talk about hosting, webapps, forum software, etc. Anyone who's interested in joining us, come on over, or IM me for a TP.

Amida 46, 145 or thereabouts.

Can't make it during the (US) day, Theo, but I'm interested in helping out and in the results of the meeting. Keep me posted, please!

Definitely. We'll post in this thread if we come up with anything good.

OK, so, here's what we did:

We made an "SLSF Web Committee" group so we can communicate without spamming the main group. Anyone who's interested, please join.

We sorted out forum hosting. Thanks Espresso! The URL will be http://fora.slsailing.org

Alan and I are investigating forum software. I suspect we'll go with either punbb, simple machines, or vanilla. You can try demos of all of those here:
http://www.forum-software.org/
Also in consideration are
Beast: http://beast.caboo.se/
RForum: http://www.ruby-forum.com/
If you have any thoughts, please share them. I hope we have new forum software up for a trial within the week.

I have started working on the CMS/Regatta Tool/whatever else it does. It's written in Ruby on Rails, so Ida suggested I name it Ruby on Sails. So I did. Nothing to show yet, but if you hear me talk about RoS that's what I mean.

(As opposed to RoSL which is Rubyists of Second Life)

Oh, and I signed us up for a beta of GMail for domains, which means anyone who wants can have a GMail account [email]firstname.lastname@slsailing.org[/email]. I also figured we'd setup club aliases (byc@slsailing.org, for example). For now, if you want an account, IM me and I'll set you up.

Think that's it...Alan? Espresso? Did I forget anything?

I logged the meeting; if anyone wants the log next time I'm inworld, just IM me.

great job, theo. thanks

OK, so I've pushed some of the RoS code up, and now we have a basic content management system with FAQ and some other stuff.

We have an announcements system, although I haven't written user authentication so no one can submit announcements. IM/email them to me, for now.

We have a club listing. If you'd like to put some content on your club's page, please have a group officer send me the text and I'll post it. You'll be able to edit it yourself, eventually...look for that around rev47

Content and FAQ submissions are welcome and encouraged!

Looking over the link for Beast, I can begin to understand why there was such a push for RoR on Bluehost. Damn that's fast. Question is how well that one can be administered.

I'm still a fan of PHP, though that's mostly due to just learning it. Barely had time for that as it was, but I wanted to understand some of what Wordpress was doing.

Since what's left of Storm Ernesto has taken residence here over the weekend, I'll have more time than originally expected to followup on looking at the other entries (once I'm done with the stuff from RL work).

--Alan

Yeah, that's the thing....in 500 lines of code, they don't give you all the features. But it's so clean and simple and fast! And, could integrate directly with RubyOnSails

So, I'd like to keep it on the list for the time being, even though I doubt we'll pick it.

Plus you can subscribe to the whole collection of fora as a single RSS feed, although I bet some of the PHP ones do that, too.

Does the forum software that you're thinking have the following features:

* possibility for users to attach / embed images (SL snapshots, sailing race course maps, etc.)
* possibility for users to attach other files
* polls
* private messaging
* seamless integration of user accounts to CMS / wiki / blog user accounts
* subforums

Just a thought since some of these (and probably other) features are what people are used to use here on SL forums, but many of those proposed forum softwares lacked.

Also in my opinion SLSF forums will be so small, that speed or performance impact on server is one of the least important things. Would be maybe different if you were planning a forum for 10.000 users.

So if I were to choose a forum software with these in mind, I'd put end user usability, feature set, and user experience on top of the priority list.

trivial to plug server into 220v

please please please advocate for user. we're just a bunch of geeks trying to put it together. are you aware of forumware that runs on freebsd that meets the users' needs? if so, we'll run it.

Here's what I found at forummatrix.org and from my knowledge of the Rails based ones:

* possibility for users to attach / embed images (SL snapshots, sailing race course maps, etc.)
punbb: no (suprising, but that's what it says)
smf and vanilla: yes
beast: no, but i can add it

* possibility for users to attach other files
same as above

* polls
punbb, smf, vanilla: yes (some require plugins/patches but that's OK)
beast: no, but i can add it, either to the forums or to the CMS/WebApp

* private messaging
punbb, smf, vanilla: yes (some require plugins/patches but that's OK)
beast: no, but...you get the drill

* seamless integration of user accounts to CMS / wiki / blog user accounts
No matter what, this is a goal, but will require someone (me, probably) to hack in the code to get it to work. This is the first one where beast scores a point, because it will be the easiest to integrate.

* subforums
punbb and vanilla: no
smf: yes
beast: no
What's the need for subforums? If we own the whole collection, and have categories, do we still need subforums?

My main reason for liking beast, other than that it is named "Beast" is because it's written in Ruby and I know Ruby, and since I'll be doing the bulk of the webapp, I can do more and tighter integration. However, all the others are in PHP and Alan knows PHP, so, we'll do our best for tight integration either way. (Regardless of what we said at the meeting

Thank you weaving the threads back into cloth.

Saxxie

a wise user i respect has asked me why not phpBB

also asked "do you want to hack ruby ... or do you want to give the users a working solution? =)"

Main thing that turned me from phbBB to punBB is that phpBB, according to forum matrix, doesn't support RSS, and they are fairly competitive otherwise: http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/phpBB+punBB However, I know nothing of either, which is why I don't really want to be the one to make the decision.

And I want to hack Ruby, personally...but I can do that on lots of projects

If customization and integration to CMS/webapp aren't big on the list, then I don't think a Ruby solution wins, as I said at the meeting. The only reason to really consider Beast for this particular case is the hackability, IF we want tight integration. I don't know if we do or not.

...this needn't be directly integrated into an announcements forum, although to do so would be nice: we need an events calendar which will allow any first-time visitor to review upcoming events at a glance, and allow any SLSF member to easily post sailing-related events and check the calendar for conflicts...ideally, the upcoming events week-at-a-glance should be visible on the front page of slsailing.org/slsf.info, with links to more detailed descriptions hosted either on a separate events calendar subpage or an upcoming events forum thread...

...my primary concern is that folks may start logging directly into fora.slsailing.org, to save the extra step of a clickthrough every time they visit the site, and thusly miss noticing upcoming events announcements in the process - kind of a usability issue, that...

I found a mod for phpbb that would do the RSS work.

One of the first places I go to in evaluating web software is its mod/plugin collection. It's one of the reasons I'm so happy with Wordpress, even if it's a little slow at times (though apparently that was Bluehost, from recent news). I've yet to truly hack at a PHP file, though I've dropped small bits of http in from time to time.

Side note - RL work took much longer than expected Saturday (total 9 hours), plus the weather cleared on Sunday and by then I was in dire need of getting away from anything computers. Been looking at various feature lists in what free time I've had anyway, will send something out in a few hours.

--Alan

Meh. So much for 'in a few hours.' I swear, this has been a roller-coaster of a weekend...

Anyway, from the Ruby perspective SMF is probably the way to go. From PHP's the two frontrunners are phpbb and vBulletin (the current version, not the somewhat archaic one used here). All three of these have most of what's asked for in general, while also having large communities of dev groups working to add to them (hopefully mitigating the amount of hacking we'd need to do).

Integration - I feel it does not need to be particularly tight. As I mentioned in the meeting, there should be relatively straightforward ways for the web and forum databases to stay in sync; That's the only big integration issue from my perspective (and for sanity's sake). With the right skinning and a minor tweak or two in the header, I'm sure that you won't be able to tell the difference too much between the main site and forum.

I know of one website where the forum *must* be separate (they're using Invision, which is paid for and so can't be modified) and you barely can tell the difference because it's been so well skinned.

Also, it may be a very good idea *not* to integrate the forum too deep with the rest of the site. If an exploit turns up with the particular vendor chosen, last thing I want is to possibly lose one of the passwords I use in general rotation (from my 'retired' list at work, but still).

Anything else I'm missing?

--Alan

i have always wondered what the user's name was

(SMF is PHP and is also highly recommended by ... whoever it is on the net that recommends these things)

Since we have no outside recommendations, and the official committee recommendation sounds like phpbb, I'm going to install it this afternoon. We'll create a test forum and let people play with it. I'll also look at how usernames are stored.

If the general feeling is that it works OK and no one has huge objections, we'll either:

1) wipe the install and start fresh, because I've figured out how to integrate login info to the main site
2) not do that, because I haven't

Does that sound like a plan?

...i feel pretty strongly that multiple levels of login are a usability no-no; if that means selecting forum software specifically on grounds of overall site integration support, i think it's important to do so...

phpBB user accounts are just a mysql table, i have seen on several CMS driven websites this being used as the primary table for users. As the registration process for phpBB is quite solid and proven to be good in use, with optional email and visual verifications etc.

Or most likely CMS users table could be used for phpBB too, anyway it works best.

If someone has the PHP skillz to mod phpbb to support logging in with firstname/lastname instead of username, I can integrate the RoS pieces with it.

I've looked at the phpbb code for the last half hour or so, and it's more than I'm willing/able to do, with my level of PHP.

Yep, I've already been looking at that today.

I guess we could just use "Theodore Polonsky" as the username, and just require people to type it in like that, instead of first/last.

... Obviously, each person would use their own name, not mine