The fact remains however, that the situation with OXP's is becoming unwieldy, with something in excess of 250 expansion packs at last count. They are spread across at least 5 or 6 different hosting locations, perhaps more. Keeping the Oolite Wiki in sync with updates and new additions to the collection is patchy at best, despite the best efforts of many here. As Oolite continues to grow and attract new fans, this situation can only get worse and more confusing to newcomers.
It is, I believe, time we found a better way to manage things.
Therefore, I would like to make a proposal.
Currently, I have 150GB of server space, hosted by a major company, with some of the best support and uptime in the industry. Bandwidth is unlimited, regardless of monthly volume, I incur no charges. It is firewalled and supports Perl, Python, PHP4 and PHP5 scripts. My hosting package includes 25 100MB MySQL databases, currently unused. RSS feeds are available, and the server is backed up daily. There are many other features I could list as well, but you get the idea.
All of this is being grossly under-utilised by me.
Therefore, I would like to make it available to the Oolite community to serve as the longed-for central OXP repository.
To that end, I have a few ideas in mind, and I would like to request comments/criticisms/ideas/opinions/additions to the following:
- I am willing to register whatever domain name we decide upon for the repository.
For consistency, I would like to maintain the look and feel of the excellent work seventh is doing on the Oolite.org website, so I'd like to enlist his aid in achieving this.
My hosting company makes more than a dozen different Content Management Systems available to me as plug-ins. This is not an area I am familiar with, but it appears the two most suitable candidates for what we are trying to achieve are Joomla! and XOOPS. Some guidance from somebody with more experience in this area would be appreciated.
I envision setting things up so that each OXP creator will have a password protected account so that they can upload their own work and fill in details/info about the package themselves.
Each account so created will be vetted and monitored by me or another admin, in order to prevent abuse.
Other day-to-day maintenance tasks will be handled by me.
RSS feeds will be set up so that end-users can be kept apprised of updates to packages they wish to track.
At least one other forum member to also have full administrative access, even if rarely used.
)
(my design has a black one). So I think we need more elegant idea.
