[geeklog-devel] Consolidation of GPlugs and Geeklog.net

[Tom Willett]

Tony,

I see that the centralization issue has been brought up again.  Let me state 
from the at the beginning, that I am willing to facilitate this, but there 
are two big issues (actually only one) that need to be addressed.  The issue 
is CONTROL.  As I stated earlier, control is a two edged sword.  When you 
bring things in house, you give your implicit stamp of approval and the 
problems that come with that.

One technical issue is that with the current file management plugin, it is 
hard to replace files (Yes I understand that Blaine is working on this).  I 
think that this needs to be in place for consolidation to work.  And I have 
quit uploading things to geeklog.net because of this problem and have not 
installed the file management plugin on gplugs because of this.

A second problem is that currently there is no central place that one can go 
to find out all the latest announcements/discussions/issues about a 
particular package.  And by this I do not mean a central site.  I mean that 
on an individual site, you might find this information in stories or the 
comments on stories or comments on the file management plugin or if the 
forum plugin is installed it could be in the discussion on the forum.  Good 
organization of the site can help here, but not always alleviate the 
problem.  (e.g. The reorganization of the geeklog site under way -- by the 
way that would be the logical time to do this).

A third issue is that when centralizing GPlugs into geeklog.net, I would not 
want to loose all the historical data, stories/comments/forum that has been 
accumulated.  How could we integrate the two?

CONTROL ISSUES:

A fourth issue is cvs access -- Tony can you partition out the geeklog cvs 
and give individual developers control over their own cvs?  That would be 
great if you could.

A fifth is control over downloads caused by issue one.

A sixth issue is control over discussion.  The forum plugin has the facility 
for other moderators -- I would say to give the individual developers 
control over their part of the forum.  e.g. Create a separate forum for each 
developer or ideally for each package.

A seventh issue is administrative.  There needs to be an easy defined way to 
add a new package which would include cvs access, creation of forum, and 
file download access.

CONTROL AGAIN:

I understand Tony's desire to have everything under a central control --  
>From a user perspective, it would make things easier.  From a developer 
perspective it would be nice to only have to go to one place to answer 
questions about my packages.  

Test bed -- It would be important to have a testbed site the developers 
could install their packages on for demo purposes.  It could be a separate 
sub-site, but complete developer access to this site would be essential, so 
that they could install and tweak their packages.   

Ego - We all do not have egos do we?  I do not think you will get a lot of 
developer participation if you do not give the developers enough control to 
feel that www.geeklog.net is partially theirs.  Perhaps start a developer 
program and list their names, require a certain standard of coding, but give 
recognition back.  Heck give the current developers recognition -- I could 
not tell you who is in and who is out.  Are there three or four different 
classes of developers?  Core, contributors, addon developers, casual hackers?

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Whatever -- I have spouted off too much again.  My offer from before still 
stands -- I will bring all my stuff over and I will encourage the other 
gplugs developers to bring their stuff.  It is up to you if you want the 
additional hassle.

--
Tom Willett
tomw at pigstye.net