Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Some Feedback From an OpenACS Newbie

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Not going to start a war about what Andrew said and how he said it, but to be honest, he is right in a lot of places. This is how people feel who are *outside* the community.

I'm not sure about your experience in the US Linuxworld Expo, but here in Germany this was *exactly* the attitude of most people I came in contact with, when explaining the technical details. For some I actually decided to drop the whole technology issue, not to scare them away ;).

Let's go step by step and offer suggestions on how we can improve ourself:

  • His statement of our LAPT environment vs. the usual LAMP one is his personally feeling, which a *ton* of developers share out there. Just because they don't post here does not mean they are not out there. And they are improving their tools as well.

    We could use some paper that does not necessarily defend LAPT, but makes a point why we are using it and shows the benefits of using it inside the toolkit. If you were new to development, why would you use OpenACS and not PHP nuke, or Zope. It boils down to the beautiful API that OpenACS offers, TCL is easy to learn, no big problems if you know PHP, you can compile PHP in AOLserver and still run your favourite applications, aso. But we need to explain this somewhere.

  • No demo site. Well, this is not true, but there is no clear link :). How about a link saying: Want to try it out, go here, linking to whatever demo site we come up with. And no, the testing site is a bad idea to use for this. Demo site should always run the latest *stable* version and have useful data in it.
  • Overloaded front page. In a way, he has a point. The middle section should stick to either some lines of "What is OpenACS" (see Zope as an example) or get the latest news in the middle (see PHPNuke). I hope we get some people to write the content and think about the design of the frontpage, once we switched OpenACS.org over to 5.0 or at least 4.6.3. I'm all for it, so count me in.
  • What about the "Powered by OpenACS" logo. Didn't someone make one? If not, Carl, Venky, would you mind? This should go into the footer of the openacs.org default-master.adp and be included in the footer of any CVS checkout or tarball we provide.
  • I know we are aware of the slowness of forum at the current stage. I did not experience it so far with aiesec.net, though with dotLRN we have multiple forum instances. I hope it improves with the new version, as he has a valid point that it might make newbies think twice to use OpenACS, if it takes so long for a posting beeing made.
  • No comment on security.
  • Search. Valid assumption. Maybe we could relable the button to "search the site". I think this will be solved with the new installation of forum (at least I have the forum search field there ;))
  • Relationship between .LRN and OpenACS. Well, the way I sold it: ".LRN is a vertical solution for universities build on top of the OpenACS toolkit. It offers predefined solutions for Professors, Students and Universities in general that enable value added collaboration using an online community". Or something in this direction. And yes, I'm aware that at the moment it is stretching the truth VERY far (taking into account that some modules, e.g. portals, are not easily usable without .LRN).
  • Privacy rules. It is a concern, but I'd say we can wait with it, til we have a new system with the new page about the user. See the thread in the .LRN forums about some discussion going on.
  • Didn't someone switch forums to Richtext widget? This would at least give IE users the WYSIWYG editor.
Okay, I guess this is all from me, I hope I did not offend anyone. The idea of writing a book about OpenACS and .LRN is still out there I hope (at least it is in my head) and maybe we could get an effort rolling in this direction as well, once we clean up 5.0, work on the site and thought about ways to attract new developers.