Do you want an official HKDUG website?

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caphun's picture

I want to start a new thread because the HKDUG logo thread was getting convoluted with discussions about the official presence of this group other than the one we're in right now.

Firstly I want to disclaim myself. I have no authority within this group. I am just a Drupal user and a member of the group - like you. All I want is to help grow this community. So everything I say is of my own opinion and anything I say could be put to vote or outrightly rejected if there are better ideas.

Last year a small group of us went ahead and setup a site at hkdug info discontinued site, our intention was to help promote the group and for sharing our experience with using Drupal. We know the domain does not make it official and if you go to the site apart from big "Hong Kong Drupal User Group" heading nothing is representative of the Group or what has happened in recent months. So it was a failed attempt. Hopefully this time round we can get enough community backing to give this more traction.

I spoke to Edison offline regarding the "official" site since he is pushing this the most lately. We agreed that hkdug info discontinued site isn't really a good domain because the acronym is not immediately apparent. drupal.hk is unfortunately taken ( if you own this and want to contribute now's the time :). So Edison put forth an application for drupal.org.hk. Again, this doesn't mean we now have to use it but it's the most likely option right now if the application is successful.

In the interest of the group we also felt that the group should be kept clean from individual gain or reliance so making use of the Acquia Hosting Package, which Nick kindly made an application for last year through the Free Acquia Hosting Program, seems to be the best way to live by that philosophy.

There's a handful of people in this group with admin rights to the hosting package already. In an ideal world we could share the access details openly but in the interest of security I'm afraid this will have to be done on an individual basis for those who show genuine interest to contribute.

For more information on the Acquia offering and the original discussion of hkdug.info see:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/26898
http://acquia.com/products-services/drupal-hosting
http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting/free-acquia-hosting

OK all that said; you may think there is no point in having an official presence. Or maybe pointing drupal.org.hk to g.d.o/hk is sufficient? Please let the group know why?

Make your mark!

Comments

I think using acquia hosting

dalin's picture

I think using acquia hosting is the right decision as it makes the site less reliant on one individual.

drupal.hk is possibly a trademark violation and we might be able to force them to relinquish the domain. But doing so would take a lot of time and effort (and there's far more blatant trademark violations that the Drupal Association is already trying to pursue). drupal.org.hk sounds like the best option to me.

--


Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Some background information

hswong3i's picture

Some background information about the registration procedure of drupal.org.hk as reference.

According to HKDNR & HKIRC regulation in order to apply for a *.org.hk we must setup a "Registered or approved not-for-profit organizations in HKSARG". In case of a simple approach we need to apply for a "Registration of a Society" from the Hong Kong police with at least 3 head count. This registration is free for charge (compare with that if we would like to form a "Limited by Guarantee" company in HK: at least 15K for the startup, which shouldn't be our cup of tea...), and process within 1.5 month. Once application approved we can always request for "Changes of Particulars of Registered and Exempted Societies" whenever and for whatever reason.

After Druapl 7 Release Party by Hong Kong Drupal User Group I check with both drupal.hk and drupal.com.hk and found that they are already preserved by reseller... In order to speed up the registration procedure of drupal.org.hk, I ask for help from my father (well, the old man within #D7RP_HK~) and Anson, and submit such registration request to the Hong Kong police on last Monday. Once these complicated documentation stuff get ready, we can apply for the drupal.org.hk as soon as mid-Feb.


Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited

Good work Edison!

nicktr's picture

Good work Edison! Drupal.org.hk sounds like the best option to me too. Keep it open, simple and not reliant on one individual.

Hong Kong Drupal User Group (Beta)

arsunyiu's picture

We are now studying the Acquia hosting, but it seems not as friendly as development with an individual server.
Therefore, we are now starting with a development site in http://hkdug.no-ip.info/

This is just a functionality preview of HKDUG website with Drupal 7.x, so please feel free to contribute with your idea and suggestion.
Once the registration of drupal.org.hk get ready, we will migrate it to Acquia's server with the new name.

Let's meet to hack HKDUG?

caphun's picture

I took a look at hkdug.no-ip.info, it's pretty slow even for a development environment. Not sure why we can't keep the development within Acquia too? I prefer the Acqua route because it keeps the development open to the group. Unless there are some major show stoppers with Acquia I think that's the way to go for dev too, plus it saves the need to migrate later.

Shall we meet to plan this out and brainstorm some ideas before proceeding further into a one-man venture?

Because we are trying to

hswong3i's picture

Because we are trying to integrate some features with Drupal 7, which most 3rd party modules are keep on update daily. E.g. Simplenews and xmlsitemap need more exploration. It may confuse other contributors with the amount of changes. The dev site is now enable with anonymous cache and memcache so the performance should looks better.


Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited

Use an SVN branch

caphun's picture

For experimental code you can start a new Branch and merge later into trunk when it's stable enough. At least that way anyone who is interested in looking into what you're experimenting on can. Right now we can't touch it unless you push to Acquia.

Migrate From hkdug.no-ip.info To hkdug.info

hswong3i's picture

Hi all,

The progress and review so far:

* DONE
      o The production server in acquia hosting: http://hkdug.info/
      o Merge SVN code with hkdug.no-ip.info and upload for production
      o Restore DB of hkdug.no-ip.info for production
      o http://hkdug.info now available as similar as hkdug.no-ip.info if possible
      o Please use your hkdug.no-ip.info username/password for access and testing
* BLOCKER
      o SVN is suck when compare with GIT for a website daily management
      o PHP in acquia is 5.2, so some modules such as notifications won't work
      o The acquia SSH is suck so I can't login and restore DB from console; I need to install backup_migrate as assistance
      o Again since no SSH + MySQL console, some minor SQL tweak that only require in acquia server become a great pain; I need to use "Execute PHP" from devel with db_query() :O
      o Again since no SSH so drush is also not possible :S
      o xmlsitemap works very well in dev server; it is not suck in acquia server (http://hkdug.info/admin/config/search/xmlsitemap/settings) :(
* TODO
      o Memcache is done within dev server; we need some effort in acquia server
      o CDN is done within dev server; we need some effort in acquia server
      o Need to double check and update all admin setup that now belongs to hkdug.no-ip.info; we need to do it once again when migrate as drupal.org.hk
      o Some modules are still not stable enough in D7, e.g. notifications, messaging, simplenews, etc
* COMMENT
      o Using acquia hosting is not as smooth as expected; it is coming with a lot of limitation when compare with a standalone VPS, e.g. Linode or GoDaddy
      o Using acquia hosting for dev is an ABSOLUTELY BAD idea, especially for early phase of development
      o Refer to EULA of acquia hosting we can ONLY host a Drupal; we may not allow to install any other else, e.g. gallery3, for our photo album (please correct me)

My suggestion would be apply for an individual VPS server under the name of HKDUG, and share it with SSH.
As I am now applying an OFFICIAL origination registration from HK police, we can discuss for the detail formation of this OFFICIAL LEGAL user group.
Therefore both drupal.org.hk and its hosting should belongs to the group but not any individual member/party.

Any idea?

Regards,


Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited

Acquia sucks?

caphun's picture

OK, after reading your comment I can only assume you think Acquia sucks. Hopefully I can convince you otherwise by answering each of the points you raised.

SVN is suck when compare with GIT for a website daily management

I'm a big fan of Git aswell, though prefer Mercurial more! But that's beside the point. SVN is better than no version control if we're to collaborate on this. I won't call this a blocker. If you really want to develop with Git we could plan a git-svn development strategy so we could develop with Git and deploy with SVN?

PHP in acquia is 5.2, so some modules such as notifications won't work

I'm biased towards this as being an issue with the notifications module not Acquia. 5.2 is a very good offering compared to many hosted PHP offerings out there.

The acquia SSH is suck so I can't login and restore DB from console; I need to install backup_migrate as assistance

Actually Acquia's offering supports db import/export/migration. You could ask Acquia support to do it by submitting a ticket and providing a db dump. They are very helpful.

Again since no SSH + MySQL console, some minor SQL tweak that only require in acquia server become a great pain; I need to use "Execute PHP" from devel with db_query()

Acquia by default offers SSH access that gives you terminal access to the MySQL console. However our case is special as we have an old subscription so we had to request Acquia to add SSH/shell access. You should now be able to ssh in and use the MySQL console.

Again since no SSH so drush is also not possible :S

Again, now you can use drush. But note, since Acquia manages it's codebase in SVN you can do anything with drush apart from writing to the filesystem. Any source code changes must be done locally and committed to SVN.

xmlsitemap works very well in dev server; it is not suck in acquia server :(

I don't understand what you mean here. You're not happy because xmlsitemap doesn't suck in Acquia?

Memcache + CDN

Do we really need these? Acquia is on the Amazon backbone and is optimised with opcode caching, uses Varnish, nginx and is load balanced. All this for free? Also if you check the speed of the current hkdug.info it's very fast even without Memcached enabled. And I'm sure it could be faster once we start optimising it.

Using acquia hosting is not as smooth as expected; it is coming with a lot of limitation when compare with a standalone VPS, e.g. Linode or GoDaddy

Yes. That is obvious. VPS is definitely more flexible. I personally recommend Linode to all my clients but you're missing the point. We need to look at this in a project to project basis. If you weigh the cost-benefit, performance and time investment the Acquia offering is very good. The cost of upkeep and maintenance is practically zero as there's a dedicated team from Acquia supporting us. Please remember as professionals time is money and the time you use to install, configure and maintain the server is money. The Acquia support team is very helpful and responsive.

Using acquia hosting for dev is an ABSOLUTELY BAD idea, especially for early phase of development

I disagree. The reason Acquia is good in our case is because the source code is centralised. If I add a module or some crazy code that breaks the site it's obvious what happened and someone else could flag this and revert the change. If we don't control the code that goes into the site anyone can add a load of crap and the site will just get bigger and out of control.

Refer to EULA of acquia hosting we can ONLY host a Drupal; we may not allow to install any other else, e.g. gallery3, for our photo album (please correct me)

You stand corrected: http://acquia.com/documentation/acquia-hosting/pear-pecl-libs
Plus do we really need gallery3 when there are great free services like flickr and Picasso?

Please re-consider.

I would like to recall my

hswong3i's picture

I would like to recall my last footnote:

My suggestion would be apply for an individual VPS server under the name of HKDUG, and share it with SSH.
As I am now applying an OFFICIAL origination registration from HK police, we can discuss for the detail formation of this OFFICIAL LEGAL user group.
Therefore both drupal.org.hk and its hosting should belongs to the group but not any individual member/party.

Other else comments are my personal opinion (and pain...) during the migration, and may not be such important for everyone.
But hosting the user group homepage under the name of itself should always a suitable and ideal idea.

"Yes, we are a Hong Kong Drupal User Group, and we are able to take care ourselves with our members and contribution :D"


Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited

My standpoint

caphun's picture

I fully support your efforts in applying for the drupal.org.hk domain but am yet to be convinced that we need to also own a VPS. There are two distinct discussion points at play:

1) formation of an official legal user group
2) where to host the HKDUG website

I agree with 1) but not with 2). I think you need to present a good case of why we need a VPS that is supported by member contributions both in time and fees. Otherwise I think Acquia is the natural choice right now.

I would like to suggest for

hswong3i's picture

I would like to suggest for an indeed discussion during 24/2 meetup or 26/2 HKDUG HP hacking section ;-)


Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited

Agreed.

caphun's picture

Oops, you leaked the 26th-Feb hack session! ;P

Everyone who is interested in contributing to the website effort is welcome to join! Details will follow in a future post.

How about drupalhk.org?

adrianmak's picture

How about drupalhk.org?

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