Forum OpenACS Q&A: New OpenACS.org Preliminary Site Map has been Posted

Hey guys,

I've posted the preliminary site map for the new OpenACS.org here (https://openacs.org/new-file-storage/one-file.tcl? file_id=150). It's an early draft and still needs to be fleshed out a great deal. But I've tried to give the general framework about what we're thinking and try to incorporate some of the community's thoughts.

Some areas, like software and documentation, still need a lot of work. Please focus on providing ideas for these areas, namely how to improve developer access to docs and packages. It's already *very* clear that everyone wants general comments on doc pages, but that's really not the whole story.

More drafts will follow. Like I said, this is a *really* rough draft.

talli

Excellent work Talli and gang. One of the things I'd like to see that could be implemented with the "Edit This Page" tool would be something like "What do I love(like) about OpenACS" where users could post their testimonials, case-studies, etc.

On the documentation side, I've been working some ideas in the back of my mind in that regard. But right now I'm focused on OpenACS 4 and getting 3.2.6 ready.

A few points:

1.) I don't see why weblogs are presented so defensively. Most of the weblogs I've seen are rather thoughtful and often interesting. I don't think I've ever seen any by "annoying 12 year olds", frankly. Weblogs, in fact, are becoming more and more a factor in the web as established journalists are doing them--there was an article in the NY Times about "Me Zines" in the last day or two, focussing on this development:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/09/business/09ZINE.html?searchpv=day01 (this article will probably only be available for free during this week)

Anyway, it might be nice to give each user a weblog as part of their account (I think advogato.com does this) or to just let people come and sign up for weblogs.

2.) To move the camera back a bit: I think the ACS has suffered for not being able to do things that people want to do out of the box. This includes weblogs.

But there are other things too: I think that Zope has succeeded at least partially because it has Squishdot, a Slashdot clone that can be used more or less out of the box. That means anyone can have their own Slashdot clone--complete with the right look-and-feel--once they install Zope.

The Zope people understood that sometimes, style = substance. Getting a Slashdot of your very own is *cool*. And everyone who sees it will feel the same. That means that they might want to try it themselves. Each Squishdot site is an advertisement for Zope--it's a viral thing. The ACS doesn't have any of that.

Speaking of Slashdot, the actual code for that site is also out there--the "SlashCode" is being used by people to build their own user-contributed-news sites. For example, plastic.com, a site used for commenting on news-of-the-day is built on the SlashCode. And there are links to Plastic on wired.com, thenewrepublic.com, etc.

The ACS has no real visibility on the web. No one is using it. Most people have never even seen it (has anyone you know ever gone to scorecard.org? I didn't think so). Yeah, people have heard of it and a few people even know what it is or have tried it, etc. But it is almost completely off the radar.

This need not remain the case, now that there's a version that doesn't require Oracle and where there's a community interested in getting it out there. But I don't expect it to be easy, since there are lots of web-frameworks, some no doubt inspired by Philip's book and/or the ACS. The field isn't as open as it used to be.

One way, of course, to get visibility, is to pick an area that hasn't been done (or hasn't been done well) and make *that* available to people. Userland has weblogs. Slashdot has its SlashCode. Perhaps there's some other functionality--something unique--that would be useful to people that either the OpenACS and/or the site openacs.org could offer. I don't know what that might be but perhaps figuring out what it could be should be given some serious thought.

Perhaps I've gone a bit off-topic with all this, but since the general idea is to do some thinking about the openacs.org and the OpenACS and how to position them, I hope these comments are constructive.

Excellent work Talli and team!
a few questions/comments:
  1. If you are planning to use OpenACS 4, we are talking about implementing these changes not earlier than end of August. Is this right? maybe we can do something before then?
  2. I am not a usability expert, but since there is such a difference between the tech and not tech community, wouldn't it make sense to have a "role oriented" navigation? e.g. a top bar pointing to a "developers" a "businesses" instead of a general "community" section.
  3. fresh content in the home page is important and the "last postings" you propose is a great thing. The same with the rotative banners. How about adding a "developers" rotating banner? zope has the static one for digital creations.
  4. The list of OpenACS sites should be improved, the sites could maybe be classified by industry, and other info sucha as a description and traffic should be provided wherever possible.
  5. when you talk about the "What is.." section, I don't think we should try to have that many links, specially not to the forums. I would start with the 100 words description you talked about and then list the ways the toolkit ads value to companies/users/developers and finally a list links explaining the packages, whitepapers for businesses and straight links to the /doc of the package for developers. This list is already too long...
I was thinking almost exactly the same thing as David: ACS is great toolkit but out-of-the box it doesn't do anything interesting.

One great thing about ACS is that it could fairly easily be extended to have a great out-of-the-box experience that would blow away other toolkits.

Imagine: after initial setup users sees a page with a few links. One liks says: "make it a Slashdot-type site". Other says "make it a wiki", "make it a weblog", "make it a bug-tracking site" etc. The architecture to support this would be easy to do: main index.tcl is just a dispatch that will redirect to some other page that implements a give "site" based on field in a db. There would have to be some plugin/registration mechanism so that different "sites" can register themselves with the "site dispatcher". When a site gets started for the first time, it would probably have to execute some code (initalized itself). One could even switch between "sites" on the fly. Think of it as "skins" over ACS capabilities.

Unfortunately at this time I fall into "much talking little walking" category. Just wanted to share the idea. I truly believe that having good out-of-the box experience, if well propagandized, could be a big boost to ACS's popoularity. I believe I've read something along those lines at some point on ArsDigita site, this idea is not that original. But it would be a killer demo.

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7: weblogs and blogs (response to 1)
Posted by Jerry Asher on
I think weblogs are key to ACS success.  Yes, it's web application meets vanity site, and it can be very self indulgent, but it is one of the few examples of convergence.  Developers meet/become journalists: Winer and Spolsky.  Journalists become bloggers: Gillmor.  Journalists surf the blogs: Maureen Dowd.  Economists/Journalists blog too: Paul Krugman.

Just a note, playing with ACS 3.2.5 one can hack together a reasonable web log of the Dan Gillmor variety (http://web.siliconvalley.com/content/sv/opinion/dgillmor/weblog/) where only one person posts entirely new messages, and other folks can respond.  The key is to a) create an ed-com type bboard, b) in the wierd stuff parameter section deny any random user the ability to initiate new threads, and then c) hack hack hack the UI.  But it should be easier, and the suggestions are right on, OUT OF THE BOX, the ACS should do self-configure itself to become interesting in the eye of the implementor.

Yon, the idea might not be yours, but it was the first time I saw it, and boy, I think it's an _excellent_ idea. OpenACS would be appealing to users looking for a solution, and still have the power to be whatever you want it to be.

I love this. If you add "Education Solution" (from the ACES folks), OpenACS could become a great thing for schools/colleges/universities to addopt. Having it out of the box would be fantastic!

We need to finish this port faster so we can get these nifty ideas to work. But if someone would grab this and start implementing now so we could release it with the 4.x release, that'd be much better!

Jerry --

while I think that weblogs would foster adoption, the other exceptionally important issue (which no one has yet addressed to my satisfaction, anyway) are the lack of reliable, _inexpensive_ hosting facilities that will allow an OpenACS installation to run.

By "inexpensive", i mean a shared server with DB access, for $30.00/month or less. Having access to such a server encourages experimentation with a variety of applications, as seen with products like phpnuke and the plethora of php-based products that are trying to be "frameworks" like OpenACS.

People are using them because it's easy and cheap to play with them.

Before the flames come crashing down upon me, the $30 price point _is_ possible to achieve with a high degree of reliability, at least with apache and mysql. (wolfwater.com has been running on such a setup for several years with minimal downtime. check out pair.com for details).

My sincere hope is that some enterprising person will prove that it can be done with opennsd and postgresql (the postgresql is the vexing piece -- it's almost impossible to find a low-cost postgresql provider.)

Yon and others,

The idea of having vertical-specific OpenACS installations is
definitely the way we want to go, and I'm happy to see that people are
coming up with this idea on their own. OpenACS needs to be a "back-end
technology," meaning where you can have:

- BITS, the powerful bug tracking system (powered by OpenACS)

- OpenACES, the easiest online education management system (powered by
OpenACS)

- OpenCommerce, the simplest online store system (powered by OpenACS)

- ... you get the picture

There is no doubt that this is where we want to go. However, if we
want to discuss this, let's start a separate thread, because this is
Talli's site map thread, and the vertical-specific versions of OpenACS
are a bit further off into the future.

Adam Farkas wrote:

while I think that weblogs would foster adoption, the other exceptionally important issue (which no one has yet addressed to my satisfaction, anyway) are the lack of reliable, _inexpensive_ hosting facilities that will allow an OpenACS installation to run.

Adam, I totally agree here--one of the reasons I ended up hosting kksmith.net myself over my DSL line was that I knew I wouldn't find a provider that would meet my (admittedly cheap) price point.

But isn't our other problem that most people who want to use OpenACS need to be able to modify it? And doesn't that create a problem for a host security-wise?

I don't really have experience in server hosting, but what do you think about a "subsidized" openacshost.org hosting site.

The idea is getting all interested people together and work out a strategy for openacshost.org. Intereseted people would most probably be companies that make cash with openacs and see a common marketing tool in openacshost.org.

The steps could be as following:

1. How can we optimize a server for MANY concurrent and independent openacshost.org users?

2. How high are the overall costs?

3. For what price would we like to offer that service? Adam mentioned 30$/Month. Is it possible to go that low?

4. If the service would cost 30$/Month, how much would every company have to contribute to openacshost.org?

Hey guys,

You've all got great ideas, but let's try and focus at least on the website. I really need as many comments as possible on the site map so that we can begin dev ASAP.

Rafael, we will be building the site in v4 well before the end of August. We'll be taking a bit of a chance given some of the improvement that are planned, but we think it's reasonably ready. If not, then we'll definitely find out!

David, I'm rather defensive about weblogs not as a module, but as a component of OpenACS. I'm not such a huge fan of weblogs in general (mostly because I find Dave Winer to be annoying) but I do agree there are some really great ones out there.

talli

I did a quick read of Talli's spec, and I may have missed something, but in the "Site Map" I didn't see something similar to "My Workspace" that currently exists. One of the most frustrating features of the the openacs.org site is that unless you know to go to openacs.org/new-file-storage, openacs.org/wp or openacs.org/sdm one may never find these parts of the site. As it exists now, the "My Workspace" link doesn't solve this problem, but it may be a good location for such links. So if you've joined the OpenACS community then these features would be readily available. I may be slow, but after reading of the file storage system in several posts, it wasn't until I installed OpenACS on my own machine that I discovered the root location of the file storage system...not exactly intuitive.
Good navigation to key bits of the site will have to be provided.  I take that as a given regardless of whether or not Talli et al mentioned it in the site map.
Poor Talli. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack your thread, so let me try to fix things: I've created 2 new threads on the bboard to redirect discussion of things not related to Talli's openacs.org site-map draft.

One is titled Sizzle vs. Steak which is meant to talk about what neat things could be added to the OpenACS and/or openacs.org to get people interested, etc.

The other is cleverly titled OpenACS Hosting, which is meant to continue the important issue brought up by Adam Farkas.

If you are interested in contributing to either of those two topics, please go to those threads and add to them instead of posting here so that Talli can get some responses to his request-for-comments about his site-map draft.

Thanks.

We should ask every member to enter some valueable data into their users_demographics table (if existing in 4.x).

This way we could have a demographics page on which all members would be grouped by country, state etc.

Maybe some statistics on the origin, age and sex of the members, too, which would make the community more real.

And skillsets, and whether or not they're willing to volunteer time to the project ...
Ahh, KM is everywhere...

British Petroleum developed a killer KM system that saved them
billions globally. Wanna know what it was?

Rich, user-editable employee profiles.

It turns out that if people in an organization know more about
each other, they tend to reach out and contact each other when
they need help. I, for one, find the ACS feature of linking all
bboard posts to a person's profile to be enormously helpful.

This is another feature that would be helpful both for
OpenACS.org and for a KM system. In fact, OpenACS.org *is* a
KM system. Anything we can think of to make knowledge sharing
easier in our particular community is worth thinking about as a
basis for broader KM functionality in the toolkit.

Speaking of rich user profiles, weblogs are a natural extension
of these.