Page 3 - Thoughts on idea for developer site

PS Sepodati - is your homepage down or is it me!?!

I'm personally not a fan of any of the CMS systems out right now. They tend to be top heavy and have a really 'cheap' feel to them (since they are all the same). I pretty much figured we'd just do it all from scratch and then perhaps release the source code for it (assuming that we feel its secure enough). But our primary goal is to get an interactive site that's designed specifically for the content of the site. Constant development of the site shouldn't really be necessary. I can see adding features as we get ideas, but devoting a staff to improvements is not something that should be to high a priority assuming we do it right the first time.

As for what AlCapone said, I agree 90% with what he had to say. But open source-esque sites shouldn't need anymore then the few core people be to constant contributors. Part of the community idea is that people can help out when they want, or not at all if they don't. Enforcing a strict corporate hierarchy of people and putting pressure on people to develop content makes for a mad community and rushed tutorials, but letting everything go anarchy-style will lead to poor quality content and random update patterns (if any at all). We need to just settle somewhere in the middle.

And of course, any money that might be made (though anything beyond covering the cost of the server is not in the plan -- and even that is on down the road) would be shared with the community either in the format of money to contributors, or some other way to benefit the whole community instead of just a few people.

This site will certainly have somewhat strict rules as to how good a tutorial has to be before it gets posted. We can't be giving bad or inconsistent advice to people.

Oh yeah, and perhaps we shouldn't blatantly rip off devshed's name ;p. Let's try to think of something else.

devgarage.com ???

JD

About the name of the site, I'm proposing these:

learn2dev.com
devtut.com
dev3lopers.com

and the one I like the most:

develoVers.com

I think develovers.com is a good name, easy to remember and with an implicit meaning: this site is made by and for people who (I hope) love to develope code. Also, it has a pronuntiation similar to "developers".

I will be posting some more in a while :-)


Have a nice day!
P.S.: no, it's not mandatory the name has the "dev" substring in it. :P

Hmm I don't think we should include the word "devshed" in the name - it's too likely to annoy DevShed and get us into trouble. I'm not sure we need to carry the origins of the site in the name either. To me it simpl needs to imply as many of the following things about the site:

* For developers/hackers
* Free financially & in terms of code reuse etc.
* Community led
* Open submission

Something like the "Open Developer House" would imply mose of those, but it's not very catchy. It's tricky because any catchy name leaves most of the implications out : / CodeAide? lol

And I agree with JonLed... I don't think we should use a blog for the site, and you don't need a rigid heirachy to develop such a project. Given a few core developers, the project will progress quite smoothly.

Because I do a lot of Windows development, one of the sites I like to go to is www.codeproject.com. The reason I bring it to your attention is that I really like the layout of the site and its content.

http://www.codeproject.com/shell/namespcextguide1.asp
At this link for example you have an article, a source download, a binary download, a table of contents, screen shots and a forum about the article at the bottom of the page.

Here's a few things I like about the site:

• It has a general forum like DevShed (The Lounge, Question Time).
• They have a good newsletter sent out on a regular basis.
• The ads aren't intrusive and deal heavily with programming stuff (ie: no casinos).
• Very good guidelines for users to submit articles: http://www.codeproject.com/info/submit.asp
• Most importantly - tons of useful content especially the articles.

The downside is it is heavily weighted towards the Microsoft world. If you could create a site like this for Open Source, I think it would be very popular. If you go to the "About" link, you can see that this site is run by 4 guys using 4 machines.

Darryl

Yeah...it expired and i never reregistered it. It was too hard to spell out to people everytime i wanted to give out my email address.

I'm just working with GeekPal.com now.

---John Holmes...

On the CMS issue- I really like the everything engine that runs www.perlmonks.org. It does alot, runs in mod_perl and is really good for helping people share source code and tutorials. It has a really cool and flexible moderation system, and has beacoup user customization features.

I personally think a premade discussion/bulletin board system is the wrong choice- a lot of customization would need to be done to get it to the point where it was functional as a developers tool of real worth.

And stay away from phpnuke. Have you ever looked at that code? It's terrible, both for security and efficiency.

Just an idea on names, but how about something like:
www.opendev.com
www.opendevelopment.com
www.devsource.com
www.openwebsource.com
www.opendevsource.com

And a question:
Do you plan on storing the code in a cvs-type library?

I'm sort of rethinking about making this a sourceforge site. This has grown beyond what I had envisioned in the first place for the site (as far as how much everybody is willing and wanting to work on the project).

Code project does have a nice layout for the site (how things flow). Its at the very least a good place to start getting ideas.

I like telex4's idea of something along the lines of "Open Developer House". If anybody can think of a domain to go with it that's shorter then opendeveloperhouse.com ;p, feel free to mention it.

The CMS perlmonk thing wont even be an option if we use sourceforge because they wouldn't let us run anything mod_perl.

Of the domains Onslaught listed, only these two are actually available:
www.openwebsource.com
www.opendevsource.com

And they are my least favorite of the 5 he listed ;p.


That's what I meant by 'top heavy' . It even make me sick to listen to a p2 200mhz development machine i used to use try to load phpnuke. You could actually hear all 53 inefficient mysql queries crunch (and that's not an joke, there were actually 53 queries done for the front page to load)


I don't think it would be to hard to sync it with the site's user database (so the rest of the site is interactive). Developing one of those from scratch would add about 400% to what would be needed to develop the base site ;p.

If we do it on sourceforge I'd imagine so. It really wouldn't be worth setting up cvs if we're on a private server because code development beyond the initial roll out of the site would probably be pretty slow.

sourcewares.com

ok, forum is cool and all that, but what do you say if we make a get-together on msn, aim or irc at the same time to discuss things in 'real life'? May be even today... say around 13:00 GMT? I am flexible, who has free time and when?

As in hosting it with sourceforge to let people work on the code base, and then moving the "live" site to your own servers, or still on sourceforge?