Posted by rfay on May 19, 2011 at 4:03pm
In working on a support option for drupalcommerce.org, I just discovered Shapado, a FOSS stackexchange clone. I'm going to experiment with it. It's not Drupal, but do we have to use Drupal, or can we just use something that works well?
As we've already noted, drupal.stackexchange.com works fantastically, but of course we have limited control of the site, no way to integrate standard external (to stackexchange) resources into it, and no control of the future of the content.
Comments
I have not used Shapado, but
I have not used Shapado, but am open to anything. I suppose we don't have to use Drupal, but we definitely want something within our control. I'm sure for, at the very least, PR reasons people would prefer Drupal. There is also a concern about introducing another piece of software that the web site team has to support. I think it would be better to use Drupal just so that we can more easily integrate it with the rest of drupal.org. I've already thought of features to add that I'm sure would be beneficial to other Drupal sites. Plus, it makes for a nice case study on how to build a site like this.
Please do let us know your findings, when you have them. Thanks.
Does it have to be Drupal?
Does it have to be Drupal? well, Joomla doesn't use pure joomla on their website. But IMO, by not eating their own dogfood, it says a lot about Joomla. Not to mention security, additional knowledge to maintain/customize, etc that @davidhernandez mentions.
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mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
List of other alternatives
Researching this, I found a fairly extensive list of Q&A-type site building alternatives at http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones
@davidhernandez, your points about using Drupal are completely correct. We'd rather not introduce new, unfamiliar technologies, and we'd rather have easy ways to integrate with sites we already have.
The counter-arguments are:
* We want something that works really well. If something other than Drupal does this out of the box, why not try it out?
* We want something that we actually get done and deployed and don't just fantasize about. If we can find a way to do that without building our own...
I have shapado running on my laptop. Like most Ruby apps, it's slow installed with rubrick. I'll have to figure out the right install setup.