Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to askme.com style modules?

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Posted by Michael Feldstein on

I know that this is over the hill, but as some people remember we had some discussion of how "hard" it is to contribute other than on bboard. We should maybe also work out a module called projects where community members can open up a colaborative space like http://www.groove.net where they can work with others (flexible permissions) on a certain project. I was working a little bit with Lotus Quickplace recently, and I thought it wasn't too bad either, although groove is a lot more mature, but therefore you have to download an application, while Quickplace is completely webbased. I always prefer completely webbased...

David, you're heading down exactly the path I've been thinking about. I've worked with Quickplace a bit too, and although I think it has some serious flaws, it's not a bad starting point. Alternatively, if you look at the class and group spaces you can create in ACES, they are also a reasonably good starting point for project spaces.

Ideally, you'd enter the system from one of two views. Either you'd be coming into a project portal view, as described above, or you'd be coming into knowledge base view, where content is laid out taxonomically (if that's a word). In either case, you should have easily accessible links to create a wimpypoint presentation, start an FAQ, start a bboard thread, post a file to file storage, and so on. Likewise, all existing relevant content items would be listed in either the project portal view (e.g., the OpenACS XSLT compatibility project portal) or the knowledge base category view (e.g., the XML category). In both cases, content contributions would be linked to rich contributor profiles.

I'll write up some functional specs for these pieces, though I won't be able to do it until next week.