Posted by robin monks on March 8, 2008 at 9:31pm
What brings me to this topic is all the excited talk I've been hearing second hand about splitting groups.drupal.org and drupal.org into many separate chunks (documentation.drupal.org, news.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, downloads.drupal.org, content.contributed.maintained.6.modules.downloads.drupal.org , you see where this is going). What worries me is that in such an implementation it may become too complex to get to key areas or discussions.
The way I see it, there are a couple major roadblocks for making such a system work (here comes the dreaded Robin-list, grab some coffee):
Comments
Well...
...right now I've completely migrated away from d.o.'s forums, since there is no easy way to subscribe. This space on g.d.o. has become a much easier place to have discussion.
And I already left comments on your blog on how OpenID across subdomains can in all likelihood be implemented to do seamless logins. Then the only remaining bit is notification: some way to find out where the new stuff is...
Also note that sepeck has
Also note that sepeck has just deprecated all the development forums. Probably some more could go the same way too. I don't really see any more places for discussion than there are now, maybe even less. And although it wasn't in the Drupalcon presentation, one of the subdomains is my.drupal.org which will presumably allow for a bunch of aggregation and notification options.
Segregation could be a good thing
OpenID coupled with cross-site (RDF) communication (like what Dries talked about in the latest State of Drupal speech/keynote) would indeed enable us to segregate drupal.org into smaller "bits". This in turn could possibly also mean that the sites wouldn't all have to update their core at the same time when new major releases are released, but could wait for the contrib modules they use respectively. This would also allow for improved scalability, as the individual sites could have their settings set for best performance for their purpose, and it would let them work on fewer (and smaller?) tasks at a time. The main drupal.org could function as OpenID-server and central content aggregator for the sub domains. This could be rather nifty. (And knowing the people behind Drupal and drupal.org, I'm fairly confident it would turn out rather nifty too! :))
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Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen
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Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen
Content Recommendation
Content Recommendation Engine could be useful. But, a powerful search across domains would, in my opinion, be a blocker before doing this.
I agree, the forums are not the most user friendly, but I'm not sure if groups have a spot for "general support".
Robin
forums
As to the forums, I spoke to sepeck briefly about this where he was talking about deprecating some but missed the documentation sprint where it actually started happening. I reckon with some more deprecation, merging, and (again sepeck's idea, not mine) sticky posts in each forum with pointers to elsewhere and FAQs - handbook, issue queues etc.) we could get it down to six forums.
All the forums not mentioned here are either more successfully duplicated in groups.drupal.org and the issue queue, or in fact duplicate each other ("general discussion" and every support forum + module and theme development + usability feedback are almost indistinguishable from each other in terms of content) - we could just merge them all into one big support forum, then nothing is 'mis-placed' and it's easier to divert people into issue queues and g.d.o where that's relevant.
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I'm in favor of dropping the hosting companies forum as well. That's such a mess.
I would add a "General Drupal Chatter" section but only after Drupal.org gets views to replace the tracker because we would likely want to exclude this forum from the tracker view. This wouldn't be a complete free for all forum where you post about what you had for breakfast but rather general questions that come up when building a Drupal site that aren't strictly Drupal questions. Questions about hosting, SEO, ideas for laying out the navigation, whether this or that design choice is better, etc, would fit in this forum. Sure, there's other websites you can ask about SEO, for example, but sometimes you want to put it in the context of Drupal or are simply more comfortable with the Drupal community and don't want to seek out another one to ask a question.
Michelle
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A general drupal chatter
A general drupal chatter forum would be fine (and might be somewhere to archive some other forums into) as long as it doesn't become yet another support forum like the current 'general discussion' one. Simply moving it to the bottom of the list might work so people see the other forums first!
edit: hosting companies is a mess, but it's also generating ad revenue sauce. However some kind of listing (like services) might be better on all counts. Then "any good hosting companies" would be fair game for general chatter.