Communications Infrastructure
As work on i++ has progressed, we've been thinking about how to organize our work and our interactions and collaboration with the i++ community and the world. There have been ideas of setting up a wiki, a subversion repository, an internal blog (see ya, Blogger), a mail server and a messageboard/forum. All these are very useful tools to not only keep in touch with those external to the i++ development team, but, to better organize the i++ development team itself. In addition, the development of i++ will be informally archived through the use of these tools.
After thinking about this, we wonder which tools we can use (i.e. grab off of the Internet and run), which tools we should build ourself (i.e. building our own website to contain third-party tools and content or use third-party portal software to begin with) and which tools will work well together? For example, I'm familiar with Tomcat and Confluence and have used them running on the same server. They work well - Tomcat is a solid Servlet container and Confluence is a very powerful wiki. When we introduce a Subversion Repository, however, things get a lot more complicated.
It would be nice to learn how to install, integrate and administer all these different web tools, but that's not the goal of the project. Very broadly, the goals are simplicity, learning and community. Our main focus should be developing the game and making it as robust, fun and useful as possible.
So, we've been thinking about building our public website and communications infrastructure using a popular content management system called, Plone. More research is required, but a flexible, robust content management system seems like the way to go if we want to avoid spending too much time in integrating various tools and servers ourselves.
There are other content management systems out there that we're comparing such as Joomla!, e107 and Sakai. All of these systems are open-source, free online portals that will allow us to bring together various tools and people to interact with each other to build and manage the project.
I've been working with Sakai for some time now, and it's sweet, but it may be nice to try something else. Really leaning towards Plone.
After thinking about this, we wonder which tools we can use (i.e. grab off of the Internet and run), which tools we should build ourself (i.e. building our own website to contain third-party tools and content or use third-party portal software to begin with) and which tools will work well together? For example, I'm familiar with Tomcat and Confluence and have used them running on the same server. They work well - Tomcat is a solid Servlet container and Confluence is a very powerful wiki. When we introduce a Subversion Repository, however, things get a lot more complicated.
It would be nice to learn how to install, integrate and administer all these different web tools, but that's not the goal of the project. Very broadly, the goals are simplicity, learning and community. Our main focus should be developing the game and making it as robust, fun and useful as possible.
So, we've been thinking about building our public website and communications infrastructure using a popular content management system called, Plone. More research is required, but a flexible, robust content management system seems like the way to go if we want to avoid spending too much time in integrating various tools and servers ourselves.
There are other content management systems out there that we're comparing such as Joomla!, e107 and Sakai. All of these systems are open-source, free online portals that will allow us to bring together various tools and people to interact with each other to build and manage the project.
I've been working with Sakai for some time now, and it's sweet, but it may be nice to try something else. Really leaning towards Plone.
posted by Gaurav at
6:06 PM
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