Oolite Bulletins

As most regulars here are aware, we regularly get requests for a centralised database/repository to host all OXP's. The usual response is that such a thing, whilst desirable, is neither cost-free nor a trivial exercise to produce and maintain. And there the matter rests.

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.

Ok, the floor is now open for comments. Over to you.

Diziet Sma wrote:

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.

The fun fact that both of them feature the desired double "O" makes this a really hard decision.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. )

Joomla! is good I'm currently looking into it as a management resource for my sites (they're frames and need flattening).

Although no expert in Content Management Systems, but have looked into Drupal (could be called DrOOpal ). This is very flexible and allows a range of possibilities from simple static content up to the building of complex forms and web based applications.

@D_Z - you, marvelous, marvelous, superstar you!

Diziet Sma wrote:

Currently, I have 150GB of server space, hosted by a major company, ...

A nice hosting.

Diziet Sma wrote:

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.

Certainly as a graphic and layout designer.
But I am afraid, my ideas for oolite.org will be useless here. This project first of all will be informative. It's easier to read black letters on a white background (my design has a black one). So I think we need more elegant idea.

Diziet Sma wrote:

the two most suitable candidates for what we are trying to achieve are Joomla! and XOOPS.

Maybe XOOPS looks preferable, but I didn't use it before.
Unfortunately I didn't find a common language with Joomla,as for me it seems like some kind of web-communism.

Drupal may not be a good idea.

The Taunton forums have been migrated to Drupal and frankly they are a disaster. Users have left in droves.

Ok, that's one strike against Drupal then.. I'll still check it out, however. Poor implementation does not necessarily mean the tool itself is at fault.

At the moment I have Joomla set up on a test web-server at home. I'll spend a week or two evaluating it before I do the same with XOOPS, then any other systems worthy of consideration.

Seventh, thanks very much for your willingness to contribute your skills. I agree with you about readability, however, I'm hoping to achieve something a little more exciting/appealing than, say, fallout3nexus.com or tesnexus.com for example. (as an aside here, maybe think retro.. remember the old orange on black monochrome monitors? That was easy on the eyes, I've often set up my development environments that way) If you like, I'll leave that to you and your imagination to see what you can come up with. There's no rush, I expect it will take me at least 6 weeks to check out CMS options before I can even start coming to grips with learning the package I decide to run with... Could you please elaborate on your comment about "no common language with Joomla", as I don't quite understand what you're getting at.


Other topics up for discussion:

Domain name:-
At the moment I'm leaning towards oxpcentral.org or oxpcentral.net for a domain name. Other suggestions are invited, however.. if we come up with several good ones, maybe we could put it to a vote.

Site Features:-
I invite all of you to take a look at the two nexus sites I linked to above. Are there features there that you'd like to see included, or features you think aren't necessary? Let me know please.. This will be the communities' repository, and I'd like it to reflect that fact as much as possible. The more feedback I get, the more I can tailor it to your ideas of what it should be like.

This is going to be fun.. I'm beginning to feel excited!

www.ooxps.com ?

About readability, I am probably in a minority but my favourite colour schemes are all in the style of this board.

Another point against Drupal could be that it was the system used on the twice! crashed Oosat2.

Ok, so far we have:

oxpcentral
ooxps

(I'm not going to use .com as this will not be a commercial site. .net would be my first choice, followed by .org)


So, two strikes against Drupal.. it's not looking good.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Ok, so far we have:

oxpcentral
ooxps

I would not go for ooxps. OXP means Oolite eXpansion Pack, so calling it ooxps would be like saying 'PIN number'.

oxpcentral sounds like a good domain name, i vote for that one too

Bookmarking this topic for future use, as It's one of the things I'm really interested in seeing done.

Wiki's just aren't made for hosting, and looking at the OXP page is a nightmare, It's way too overcrowded. And the interface for editing isn't really that user friendly, and having to edit a whole page just to link one oxp seems odd.

So I'm all for an OXP hosting site. Good Luck.

Having further investigated XOOPS, it seems to be mostly directed towards forum style sites, which is not the direction I envisage the repository going. I want each OXP to have its own page, not simply a post in a forum. There are also other related limitations caused by this format, which, to my mind, make it unsuitable for what I want to achieve.

Additionally, in comparison to Joomla, XOOPS appears to lack maturity and has a much smaller range of plugin modules available. So far I'm leaning towards Joomla...