Hi,
I have some good news for you :)
Moinak had announced about a new belenix server coming up about a month ago,
along with a call for some help with the Belenix website. There's a couple
of reasons I had taken up interest in it. 1) I wanted to give back to the
community somehow. I am (right now) not that much into OS development, so I
saw contributing to the website as a great way to give back something. 2)
The plus point being that the website was made upon drupal, of which I am a
die-hard fan :). 3) I found it a great opportunity to work on a production
solaris server and sharpen my server admin skills. learning all the dtrace
hacking of drupal for performance increase, security, debugging, etc. :)
It's great. I've always wanted to find a converged opportunity covering both
solaris and web development (actually solaris, drupal and netbeans!).
It's been around 4 days since I've been ripping apart the belenix website
and creating something totally new. Not literally, just joking :)
I had initially thought of just doing the revup and launching the new
website and announcing all the good news together in one go, but as this is
an open community, even website development should be discussed in the open
and I am posting about the current status of my work.
The following tasks are complete:
- Upgraded from drupal 4.7 to 5.7
- Fixed user login session persistance problem that Moinak reported
- New theme design complete
- New fluid width theme
- Inherits it's stlye from old theme
- Completely new layout
- Utilizes the page space most efficiently
- Much more place to plugin stuff
- Meant for a community portal and not just a portfolio website
- 6 user blocks, footer, header, content-bottom, content-top, and 2
sidebar blocks :)
- Cross-browser compliant.
I want to discuss a new feature with you, which I've just named "Community
ScoopZone" or just ScoopZone for now but ofcourse tell your suggestions for
a good name.
I had initially thought this up when I had seen the belenix fanspeak
section. I am regular user of sdnshare, digg and netbeans.dzone.com. You all
must be knowing Digg. FYI, sdnshare (
http://sdnshare.sun.com/about/overview.jsp) is a digg-like forum for
contributing developer info/tech tips/samples with a built-in rating and
voting system for content and users. Its inspired from Digg. Similarly,
there is Netbeans Dzone.
Last night, I found drigg (drigg.org). It's a collection of drupal modules
for making a digg clone. I dugg deep into it in the past 2 days and brought
up our very own belenix ScoopZone. It wasn't at all as simple as installing
a drupal module in this case (though i thought it would be) since the module
ships with its own theme with custom code hacks (not part of the drupal
theming subsystem) to display UI. So took me some time to adopt the belenix
theme with a lot of code and CSS hacking to get it to show just like
drigg.org. That's what I've been upto since yesterday and now it's ready.
Here's the system: any user can submit a "scoop". A scoop has to have a URL,
a short description, some tags and a category. The description can be aleast
X characters and upto Y characters, etc. (all configurable). For category I
have made these right now: Tips and Tricks, Code/Hacks, Article, FAQ, Blog
Post, News, but I need you guys to give your inputs as you all are the one's
who would use it and know what categories should be there. There are 3
sections - published, upcoming and archived. On submitting a scoop, it
enters into the "upcoming queue", where it waits until somebody "votes" for
the scoop. Users can vote it up or down. After getting X votes it will be
"promoted" to the "published" section (which is the main scoopzone page). If
the scoop doesn't get a single vote in the next X hours it will move to the
"archived" section. Apart from categorization (tech tips or articles, etc.)
users can choose to see scoops within past 24 hours, past 7 days, etc. On
the right sidebar, there are blocks for 'best upcoming scoops', 'best
published scoops', 'best alltime scoops', and a tag cloud. Users can comment
on scoops. Their profile picture will show with comments as well as scoops.
There is a automatic member "ranking" system. Each user has a "karma", which
is like a score calculated based on the number of scoops submitted, number
of comments made on scoops of other users, number of votes give to other
scoops, etc. (the factors are configurable as well as the numbers).
Yes, there is even a button we can let users put on their blogs which can
let their visitors "scoop" stuff to our website. It even sends a pingback to
the original URL. There's RSS feeds for scoops, even for categories. There's
lot more :)
I thought this will be a really good way of driving community participation
on the website. I see a lot of people accomplishing new hacks / tricks on
the BOSUG mailing list and in the opensolaris community in general too.
People share their ideas / hacks on mailing lists. People blog about the
latest news about open source. People bookmark good stuff, digg it, share it
on social bookmarking sites, etc. We could provide a platform for this, just
like sdnshare and netbeans zones is, with the voting / rating system in
place for motivation. I'm no a slashdot user but Moinak said this is
somewhat like the way Slashdot news is published. You can say that this
concept is quite similar to slashdot, though I would rather associate it
with sdnshare since that's what inspired me to implement it. It can also
serve as great way to aggregate knowledge in one place which might otherwise
get scattered.
It's all ready. See the screenshots attached.
Apart from that, this is what has been keeping me busy:
- Community map
With this system in place, one day we will see all users and fans of
belenix community on map :)
- User can select his location using a map in account settings
- Mark location by clicking map [1]
- Geocode support - user can search his location by address / city /
state / country [this took a full 1 day to implement with lot of code
hacking in location module and use of google maps geocoding API] [1]
- Different marker icons for different roles - core developer (red), new
community member / normal user (blue), etc. (configurable) [3]
- Clustering support - shows a cluster icon where there are more than X
users, clubbed info window showing all their names [2]
- Installed following modules:
- update status: Automatic checking of module versions from drupal.org
- admin menu: dhtml hierarchical menu for administration options
- jstools: AJAX Search, collapsable blocks, javascript calendar, etc.
- Image captcha (with batman forever font)
- comment notify - email notification of comments
- stringoverride - for renaming strings like "my accounts" to "user
settings", etc.
- inactive users - automatic sending of "We MissYou" reminder to
inactive members (those who haven't logged in for X days)
- Persistent Login ('Remember Me' checkbox in login form)
- Secure login (HTTPS)
- pathauto - friendly URL's like
belenix.org/content/Belenix_Rocksinstead of
belenix.org/node/18, etc.
- Printer Friendly Version link on each page
- Taxonomy Access Control, Views, CCK, google analytics, views_bonus
and contemplate
- login / accounts / settings / member display name in upper right
corner
- no author info for page [code hack in node.tpl.php], enabled user
pictures, default user icon set, no user pictures for page [code hack in
node.tpl.php]
- Tweaks, other tweaks and more tweaks.
Now, what's left in my to-do list:*
*
- *Mailing list and forum sync using phpBB and mail2forum:* Forums are
much more lucrative medium for communication. They are much more presentable
than mailing lists, get more hits from google, are easy to search for
answers, and have many more features (code highlighting, etc.). It builds a
much better community. Take ubuntuforums.org for example. I propose to
use a mail to forum bridge and start an online community parallel with the
mailing lists. I know the Jive forums at opensolaris.org exist, but this
can be much better.
- *Aggregated Blog*- We can also have an aggregated blog just for
belenix. Currently individual developer blogs are linked to from the main
Belenix website, but something on the lines of planetnetbeans.org can be
done, thought not necessarily being open to all, only the closed set of core
belenix developers and community contributors may submit their feeds to be
aggregated at once place.
- A few IE-fixes, pretty icons in the menu, and stuff like that. :)
Later Stuff:*
*
- *Event Management System*- Belenix is an active community andd has
frequent upcoming build releases, and other planned events ? online, offline
and real-life. Is there a system in place which let's you create an "event"
on the belenix website and let's users RSVP for the event by signing up to
it, get notification reminders for the event by email, RSS and/or Twitter?
Can the users see a calendar of events, etc? All this can be done.
- *Login Integration: *We can probably make the Belenix website login
using the same password as the one members use for the mailing list.
- *Front splash page* - Static front page different from Drupal's
"?q=home" that looks something like this: http://packagekit.org/.
*Screenshots:*
http://tinyurl.com/4qwdd4
http://tinyurl.com/4eym9a
http://tinyurl.com/48axzk
http://tinyurl.com/3zhmdj
http://tinyurl.com/6ofp6g
http://tinyurl.com/5zbkpd
http://tinyurl.com/5zq76u
http://tinyurl.com/6kk3jo
http://tinyurl.com/5v225f
Comments, constructive criticsm, suggestions, and everything else welcome
and appreciated!
Angad Singh
http://angadsingh.in
http://blogs.sun.com/angad
"The best way to predict future is to invent it"
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