Re: GNOME news: Slashcode and the new version Bender

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2001 at 12:14:48PM +0100, Christian Schaller wrote:
> On 16 Mar 2001 20:19:26 -0600, Joakim Ziegler wrote:

>> I've looked at Slashcode before, and while I agree it's an extremely
>> flexible, scalable and mature codebase, there are a few drawbacks in using it
>> for Gnotices:

>> * It's Perl, not PHP. If we're not going with PHP, we might as well stay with
>>   (an updated version of) Squishdot. We'll still ahve to implement all the
>>   template stuff twice, etc.
 
> I disagree on this point. AFAIK dot.kde.org ran using a newer Squishdot,
> and while it ran more stable than Gnoticres (I think it did, but I only
> visited it 3-4 times total) it still when down once in a while, at least
> when being Slashdotted. 

I visit dot.kde.org fairly often, and yes, it's a lot more stable than
Gnotices. I didn't notice any downtime when it was last Slashdotted (the KDE
2 release), but I might have missed it.

Basically, handling Slashdotting is trivial. Handling any "extremely high
number of hits" situation is trivial, if you have enough bandwidth to handle
it, and enough hardware to fork the number of Apache processes required. It's
merely a matter of always caching everything that's cacheable. I don't know
whether or not Squishdot does this, but I know Slash does.


>> * It's vastly overkill for something like Gnotices.
 
> Well it might be, but better overkill than substandard. As primarly a user/editor
 
> on Gnotices my main concern that whatever solution is choosen it is
> something that the wed developers here on gnome.org is willing to
> support in the long run. The advantage of Squishdot and Slashcode in
> that regard is that it mainly requires sysadmin work, not development.
> But if 'everyone' here is a PHP developer and wants to help maintain our
> new site backend,  I don't have a beef with a PHP based solution, but
> please make sure that we don't get something that is developed to a
> minimum of functionality after which its primary developer leaves and
> after that every request for a bugfix or new functionality is met by a
> 'sorry the guy who worked on that crud is gone and I am not touching it'
> or similar messages. 

If at all possible, I'd like to not develop our own forum solution. What I'd
like is to find a PHP based one that does what we need, and is built to work
within a larger framework, that is, that doesn't assume it's going to be the
main thing on a site, and everything else will conform to it.

If we find such a system premade, it'll cut the risks of it being abandonware
later. Of course, we will need to do some development later anyway, which is
one of the main reasons we're using PHP; not necessarily just because of
technical merits, but because it seems to be what most people here are
comfortable with.

I haven't looked at PHPNuke yet, but I'm going to, I have hope that that will
be a good forum solution for us (if not, we might be able to customize and
submit patches).

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/