Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours?

32: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 1)

Posted by bill kellerman on 10/27/03 08:10 AM

first, i wholly support jeff davis.

second, my suggestions deal more with the learning curve of oacs.

- gather the various, scattered openacs documentation and make sure it's all up-to-date.

- present a clearer community view of best-practices, methodologies, suggestions for site planning and development with oacs. more examples. encourage users to submit case-studies. maybe set up a specific "educational" area of openacs.org for users to share their suggestions and experiences.

- require packages maintainers to document the scope, requirements, and status of their packages. the community should "certify" packages (ie. a community-recommended package) by reviewing quality, completeness, qa-testing and value. require package maintainers to document and communicate the status of their packages to the community or risk losing certification. clearly document packages that are not certified, and what the ramifications are for using them. encourage users to get their packages certified.

- easier install. i've installed oacs many times on a few different platforms. it's slightly tedious with plenty of finger-crossing.

- offer precompiled binaries for different platforms of the different software pieces required for installation

33: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 32)

Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 10/27/03 08:28 AM

Since we don't really have many active package maintainers at the moment, would it be wishful thinking to ask each person who is making requests of "the package maintainers" to themself commit to maintain a package? I'll commit to maintain photo-album, if nobody else is doing so.

34: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 33)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 10/27/03 09:13 AM

I think we should do that. We need package maintainers to foster and grow the sense of responsibility among OpenACS participants.

Doing it yourself is the safest of way of getting it done :)

35: Re: Top Ten Priorities for OpenACS ... what are yours? (response to 33)

Posted by bill kellerman on 10/27/03 04:00 PM

first, let me say that i think the oacs community has done a great job so far and is very easy and helpful to work with. i don't want to give the impression i'm bitching or criticizing and expecting everyone to do my work for me. i agree -- if someone has the time and inclination to make requests, they should be willing to support making them happen.

it seems that oacs veterans have a big burden when recruiting new contributors in communicating the why's and how's and peculiarities of the system.

my points one and two would go a long way towards handing things over and sharing the load. people new to the oacs are at a disadvantage by not knowing the backstory (why are there three different versions of ticket tracker? are we supposed to use the one that doesn't break? which one does everyone else use? if i want to develop something with it, which content management system am i supposed to use? do i use ad_form even though half the code in other packages don't? why don't they? just examples...)

point three -- would i volunteer to maintain packages? you bet. considering i'm an oacs beginner right now, would that be a good idea? probably not. but i can sure offer moral support!... and let you know the point of view of new users.