Yes I would be interested in a new forum.
However, I would not restrict the forum to designers only. I think the
central idea of a new forum should be, to cover OpenACS as a 'PROGRAM out of the
box'.
Why? Most 'guru-people' seem to be working with an adapted version (built
upon other systems and/or OpenACS 3.x and older). I'm afraid that is the reason
that basic UI's (ef group admin) are not optimal functioning. To be
honest, I think I didn't meet anybody at the OpenACS social we had recently (It
was fun to be there! Thanks Greenpeace!).who had a complete OpenACS 4.5 site
up-and-running (probably my mistake). This made me wonder whether OpenACS is a solution as a 'program' or
a development environment; especially when I see practical questions (Out-of-the-box, or new package?) being deferred to dotLRN.
So yes, let's have a
forum that is UI oriented. This would help designers and programmers that use
the UI as an interface to understand OpenACS as a 'program'. Probably the
community could grow faster. Furthermore, an UI oriented forum would be an
alternative way to write practical documentation (!). Let us struggle together
with the basic pages/UI that are provided by the standard OpenACS 4 tarball
(including adp, tcl, xql, html, vuh files etc) and let's exchange examples.
My
proposal would be to have forum questions TAGGED with OpenACS version-number and
UI-names. This approach might help to find 'basic' and 'fundamental'questions at
the UI-LEVEL (and the code that is underneath). It will also be easier to find
out which features are there and which are not. If we would have a real
installation of the latest OpenACS release (hub.org?), with a Bboard widget included on
every page, that would even be better. Each widget should be a part of the
central bboard, but with UI specific information. Is this realistic ?