Shared website development and/or hosting

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 11/15/2012 10:36 PM, Titanus Eramius wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Nov 2012 21:32:57 +0200
> Jussi Kekkonen <tmt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>> The biggest "why" for me is the fact that maintaining the platform
>> (themes etc) and content tends to take more work than there's doers.
>> If basic contents would be done with bigger team, translations would
>> be easy to do and more easily organised than creating contents from
>> scratch. All the rest is easily thrown to wiki I'd say.
>>
> In this I agree 100% and I think it should be the main reason for
> working towards a common site. In DK we have around ~350 active
> members, but only 2 admins and 2 mods, which (in my opinion) means some
> things just don't get done.
>
> However, I too disagrees in having one forum only, since a fair part of
> the danish users don't do english (at all). One solution might be to
> have 5 "top level forums", so one first chooses language (DK, SE, NO,
> FI and EN*), and then can browse the localized forum.

I'd like to keep the forums discussion separate from this website
discussion. I don't personally have any motivation to pursue a shared
forum, even with areas for all different languages.

> My rationale for thinking this way is the great value of past threads
> in a forum, and collecting the knowledge of Scandinavia within one
> site would be reason enough for me to work towards one site. Having all
> this in one place, would also mean the search-function would show
> results from all of the forums.
>
> A large site like this, would also be able to have a wiki and other
> nice things which we currently don't have in DK because we lack
> manpower.

I'm not sure wiki should in the scope of this discussion either, but
that's of course possible later. But why would we want/need a shared wiki?

> One very big downside to all of this, could be that our forums would
> loose their sense of nationality and become "too big" for some users.
> This is why I think it's important that a common site would have
> individual sections with individual language and so on.
>
> In the end, however, we all have to remember that we are doing this for
> the users, not us.
>
> On another note, I would like to know what software and hosting
> solutions you are using. Just out of curiosity.

I believe most are using the Canonical-hosted servers.

While the service is free for LoCos, it has some downsides. The biggest
one not being able to work with the code "live". Anyway, this works
relatively well, at least if you can test things you push somewhere else
first.

> In DK we are using Wordpress for the entire site, and then phpBB for
> the forum. They are both a bit bloated (in my opinion again) but the
> support for both of them is good, and problems can always be fixed.
>
> For hosting we're using GleSYS in Falkenberg, Sweden, running a
> standard VPS with Debian (we have a good reason...) for 23€/month. It
> really kicks ass over normal hosting like one.com or the likes.
>
> Med venlig hilsen Nicky
> Admin and so on in DK :-)
>
>
> * Might not be a good idea, but if we have forums for Scandinavia, we
>   might as well have for english and maybe Islandic and other "nordic"
>   countries.
>

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                      » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project and Xubuntu       » http://shimmerproject.org/
Graphic artist, webdesigner, Ubuntu member  » http://xubuntu.org/