Re: My first stab at the site

[Steve Fox <drfickle k-lug com>]

On 15 Mar 2001 23:51:22 -0600, Joakim Ziegler wrote:
> The forums look more Usenet/open discussion oriented, though. We'd like
> something along the lines of Slashdot/Squishdot/etc., more like a news
> posting site where people happen to be able to attach comments to the
> postings. I didn't see anything along those lines on the SF site, but perhaps
> I'm wrong.

Take a look at http://foxhut.org:82/ . That's what I'm working on for my
LUG. I think it's similar enough to Slashdot, no?

> The codebase seems very oriented towards services as opposed to content.
> Which makes sense, since all SF is is the user contributed content. But this
> focus doesn't fit the GNOME site very well, since we consist at least 60% of
> static content, and the SF codebase isn't very focused on that (for instance,
> the navigation of their About SourceForge sections and others are not very
> nice at all).

The codebase is extremely flexible. You can do as much static or dynamic
content as you want. The nice thing is it doesn't force you into a
framework...it's very hackable. You essentialy just steal the functions
you need where you need them. 

> There's no autogeneration of menus, no automatic navigation system, very
> little in the way of smart formatting of content, etc. This stuff is
> necessary to manage a heavy content site like the GNOME one.

I'm not quite sure if I follow you here. All the menus on SourceForge
are dynamically generated. 

> So to me, it seems like there's good functionality in SF, but perhaps it's
> easier to rip out the stuff we need. That, of course, would depend on how
> interdependent the SF code base is. In my experience, large web codebases
> like that lack a bit of generalization and are very interdependent. But in
> the worst of cases, we can at least look at how SF does things when we need
> to duplicate that functionality.

That's really what I'm doing....only copying over function as I need it.
Keeps it small and easier to manage.

-- 

Steve Fox
http://k-lug.com