Joomla! Forge Q&A

[Boomzilla]

Hi - I'm Colin Bodell from VA Software, the folks behind SourceForge. While there are many similarities between the new Forge and the old one, there are also many differences (duh!). if you have questions regarding the mechanics of the new site please post them here and I (and a bunch of motivated (and by this time of night somewhat inebriated...) SourceForge folks will do our best to help you out. I promise, no "RTFM" replies :-).

Good news is that there are many Joomla and SourceForge developers working together to customize the site, integrate SourceForge and Joomla and generally do whatever we can to make you all as productive as we can.

Col

[stingrey]

Would like to publicly acknowledge the outstanding help and support Colin his crew and VA have provided us.
They have enabled us to take a very significant step forward with the development of Joomla!

We hope that throught this partnership that the community of Joomla developers will grow into even more of a force than it was before.


Also we look forward to working closely with Colin and his team, and building something throughly special.

[MercedesAMG]

will there be an ability to look at just modules

or just compoents

by date etc

search function didnt deem to have this

[Boomzilla]

Search (which is based on Lucene) is quite powerful (the capability for searching within documents (word, powerpoint, pdf etc -- over 300 different file types a last count). Once you have a set of search results, they can be viewed by tool-type and sorted.

Other ways of getting information/finding stuff is the Reporting engine. Although it's presented on a project-by-project basis it can be used to report on Trackers and Tasks across multiple projects (as long as you are a member of those projects or the defaul project permissions allow anonymous reporting).

Give me a bit more information about what you mean by "ability to look at just modules .. or components". - The planned project categorization mechanism may be the solution for this (if I understand the question).

Col

[MercedesAMG]

From time to time I go through the entire listings of modules only OR the entire listing of components only

the current listing is one of everything alltogether

some project descriptions have the word modules, components, mambots and templates

project list has
column 1 = Project Name
column 2 = Project Description
column 3 = Project Admin

I want to look at and sort say
column 4 = Project Type (if column 4 was Project Type)

[Boomzilla]

Gotcha - thanks for the clarification.

the Project categorization system will support what you're looking for. All we need to do now is to complete it.... :-)
I'll catch up with Zac early next week on this and post status/plans etc.

Thanks!

Col

[manuman]

OT: I have made this topic a sticky.

Cheers
Shayne

[MercedesAMG]

A good example to watch out for is a Project named Joomlahut

Their Project description is CMTs for Joomla
C - Components
M - Modules
T - Templates

what would that one be categorized as or would you have to create master/sub category

On a search for modules assuming the search happened on the desc field their listing wouldn't even come up cause the word modules isn't in the description and joomlahut is not necessarily a producer of modules

they may or may not have a development project ongoing
they may be a great Joomla resource(they are)
but not necessarily what a modules development list I'd be interested in at the time

hope that helps

[joncutrer]

You made my day when I found the SF Developers Guide PDF!
http://developer.joomla.org/sf/docman/d ... eforge_api
Will SOAP services be enabled for developer.joomla.org?
I am planning a new project for Joomla that could take advantage of such an interface.

[Boomzilla]

SOAP API - sure - it's available right now. We'll be using the SOAP API for the Joomla modules that will interact with SourceForge.
project: SourceForge - Joomla Modules is where we'll do the development so there will be plenty of examples to reference.

There is a discussion forum on the SourceForge user site that VA Software runs -- it's got pretty strict registration criteria, but I'll be happy to authorize Joomla! developers who are serious about working with the API to join. I'll add my various IM accounts to my profile a little later today (Sat PST) and you can IM if you would benefit from this. We're also chatting with Mitch about running a web/phone-conference based training session (say 1 - 1.5 hours) on SourceForge and the API. When this is scheduled I'll make sure it's posted in this forum.

Col

[musicones]

Hi,

I've got my Project on an Sourceforge System also (BerliOS, using SVN as SCM).
How can I easily bring it to the new Forge?

Another one.
I've got subprojects structured in folders:

joomlagerman
  --components
    --simpleboard  <-- would be one project
    --remository    <-- would be one project
  --modules
    --xyz              <-- would be one project

What would be the best structure for that, reguarding to grant access only
for subproject members.

regards
musicones

P.S. I love this System

[Boomzilla]

Regarding moving projects to the new Forge -- I'll ask Doug Hunley to post a response to this question (he's much better at that topic than I).

Regarding project structure - this version of SourceForge supports a flat structure only (no concept of 'foundries' which which you may be familar on SourceForge.net). Best thing I can recommend re: permissions,  is to create a project, set up the permissions structure, tracker fields, document manager structure etc you would like to have consistent across all of your projects and create a template from that project (Project Admin > Project Settings > Create Project Template).

Thereafter, any new project you set up, select that template and the new project structure will be consistent with all of your other projects. Makes life much easier when using the 'report' app across multiple projects (for example)

May not quite what you were hoping to hear - but I hope this helps.

Col

[musicones]

I'm not shure If I explained correctly what I want to achieve.
So I try it again, because your answer about the rights didn't satisfy
my needs at all and wasn't the answer to what I thought I ask you ( a bit confusing).
Anyway...

I've got one project. (and don't want to setup others, that would be confusing).
Inside this project I want to built up an SCM structure (Repository and Folders) with SVN,
where I can give restrictions or grant access to repositories or to folders inside the repositories,
e.g.

Repository 1 - Access: MemberA, MemberB,      [no Access to MemberC]
Repository 2 - Access: MemberC                      [no Access to MemberA and MemberB]

and / or

Repository 1 - Folder ...\components\simpleboard  - Access: MemberA                  [no Access to MemberB and MemberC]
Repository 1 - Folder ...\components\remository    - Access: MemberB, Member C  [no Access to MemberA]

I hope to have clarified what I want to do.

thanks for your help
musicones

[pitsche]

Hello ,

I want to thank Colin and his crew and ( at ? ) VA for providing the Joomla! - Community with such a big Forge .

pitsche

[davidgal]

Great forge!

A small how-to question:
How does one use a svn client (such as tortoise) to checkout the joomla sources? After opening an account there was an email mentioning that the username and password are valid for the SCM. So far have had no response from svn://scm.joomla.org.

Thanks

[Nivuahc]

First, let me add to the other THANK YOU's that have already appeared.

THANK YOU!!! 

Second, as a person who never used the old 'forge and who is looking forward to this new forge, is there a quick/simple "getting started" guide for people like myself?

I'm trying to learn template development. Can I put these on the new forge? If so, what are the basic steps for doing that? I may attempt to delve into component and module development. Do I create a new project for each or do I create a single project (i.e. Nivuahc's stuffs) and put everything under there?

[Nivuahc]

In an attempt to be proactive, I clicked on the "Online Help" link on the new forge and it only opens a new window with no content. 

So I tried the "Sourceforge User Guide" and all it did was lock up Firefox and caused me to have to restart my session. 

ah well, maybe I'll just try some stuff out and hopefully not break the new forge in the process

[manuman]

Second, as a person who never used the old 'forge and who is looking forward to this new forge, is there a quick/simple "getting started" guide for people like myself?

Yes there will be... when is another question. Even the Core Team are on a learning curve at the moment.

[hotnuts21]

Hi Col,

I would like to thank you for doing this , but I have a question that I hope you can answer. Its not meant as a dig or a critisicm, im just curious and think it would be good for people to know, especially as it now adds a lot of weight behind the project.

Why? Why have you decided to help out Joomla, donating software, hardware etc? Why did you choose to help this project out and not just tell the devs to 'shove it on sourceforge'. There are loads of project out there, especially in the CMS world, why choose this one for special attention?

I look forward to your reply.

[eyezberg]

Colin, thanks a lot for you guys' fantastic contributions;
what would be helpful is make your tips threads sticky, so they don't get pushed out of sight
At least untill most pple get used to the new projects home, or compile a FAQ maybe.

[Predator]

This will also be very helpful:

http://developer.joomla.org/sf-help/en/ ... _Guide.pdf

[edit]Ha was allready mention before, didn`t saw this sorry[/edit]

[Boomzilla]

OK - digest based reply from me :-)

Re:  Why have you decided to help out Joomla, donating software, hardware etc? Why did you choose to help this project out and not just tell the devs to 'shove it on sourceforge'. There are loads of project out there, especially in the CMS world, why choose this one for special attention?"

Very good question with a multifaceted answer:

1. Mitch asked us to do this for the Mambo/Joomla community. We were working to pull it together when the Joomla split (hope that's the right word..?) occurred. We then pumped in some gas, lit the fuse and rolled out the new site. We're still working on th site as you can see -- but we've a bunch of great developers at SourceForge and within the Joomla community working on the site. We're hitting bugs, teething problems etc as fast as we can. Seems to be going well thus far -- but that's only my opinion....

2. So if Mitch asked us to do it and we said yes and ponied up the software, hardware, hosting facility, admin and network bandwith what do we get out of it? Well, lots. We get the chance to with a vibrant community who we're sure will exercise SourceForge to it's limits. this will shake out bugs (that we'll do our best to fix!) and enhancement requests (which we'll do our best to implement). We also get a environment where we can develop and role out for live/heavy use, integrations between SourceForge and Joomla. Fact is that (we think) SourceForge is a great collaborative development application, but it is nowhere near as flexible and customizable from a CMS system as is Joomla. The combo of the two we think will be awesome.

Re: Making Tips sticky - will do.

Re: Help System -- yup the on-line help is broken :-(. I'll file a bug report and get it fixed pronto. Until it's fixed you can download the SourceForge "Getting Started" guide from: http://developer.joomla.org/sf/docman/d ... umentation

I've also put the full User Guide  (aka "the telephone directory") and the SDK Developers Guide in there too.

Col

[gsbe]

Thanks for putting your faith in our community, Col and the rest at VA. I'm sure that we are all hoping that this collaboration continues to be mutually rewarding.

[Predator]

Thanks Col for your very impressive answers, i guess i`m not only speaking for myself but the whole community is thankful and will support you and VA in any ways to make the current Version of Sourceforge Enterprise better ( if this is possible ) I remember the days of the alexandria project and in comparison to this Forge there are lightyears

Thanks again, also for the new Docs the API is much better now as in the past and if this was available in the past it would save me a lot months while i integrate in the past the sourceforge Version to a complete XOOPS Clone which is now also used by the Novell Forge, but the Enterprise Edition looks totally different and for me better.

I believe the collaboration will be successful for both sides.

[Boomzilla]

I think that even if we stopped here we'd all have much to be proud about ---- not that we are planning to do so!!!!

One thing about the document manager is that all docs (in fact all data inside SourceForge) is indexed at time of submission and update. When you search you can search the contents of the the documents (we support about 300 different binary file types). The review mechanism is nice too -- "required reviewers" get an e-mail ping if they don't respond by the deadline defined by the review :-) You can run, but you can't hide....!

col

[MarkV]

When i look at the current projects i see a large list. Managing it in a 'list kinda way' is going to be difficult so i think we need a folder structure. Just like we see on the joomla forum. That should keep it manageable. : Project Categorization will be coming to J!Forge:http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,6620.0.html
Furthermore: WE LOVE YOU VA :-)
The forge is great looking, fast and very usable.

[mcjamison]

Hi folks,

First a bit of introduction - I'm Jamie, and I work with Colin  on SourceForge.  I just jumped in here, and am delighted to see all the enthusiasm here; I think this will be a great collaboration.  Already, I've learned a lot about things we could improve, just by reading these comments. 

Let me dive into one question from earlier:

I'm not shure If I explained correctly what I want to achieve.
So I try it again, because your answer about the rights didn't satisfy
my needs at all and wasn't the answer to what I thought I ask you ( a bit confusing).
Anyway...

I've got one project. (and don't want to setup others, that would be confusing).
Inside this project I want to built up an SCM structure (Repository and Folders) with SVN,
where I can give restrictions or grant access to repositories or to folders inside the repositories,
e.g.

Repository 1 - Access: MemberA, MemberB,      [no Access to MemberC]
Repository 2 - Access: MemberC                      [no Access to MemberA and MemberB]

and / or

Repository 1 - Folder ...\components\simpleboard  - Access: MemberA                  [no Access to MemberB and MemberC]
Repository 1 - Folder ...\components\remository    - Access: MemberB, Member C  [no Access to MemberA]

I hope to have clarified what I want to do.

thanks for your help
musicones

Thanks for the clarification, musicones - your initial post left me with the same impression of what you wanted as Colin was left with.  Now's it's clearer.  I'll make my response a little verbose, as it may be handy for other project admins reading this thread. 

You can definitely get the access control you want, through SourceForge's RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) settings.  This is accessed via the "Project Admin" taskbar button (visible if you have project admin privileges), by clicking "Permissions" on the left.  The steps you'll want to go through:

1) Give ROLES access to RESOURCES.  A given Role can be given certain access privileges (e.g. read or write) to certain Resources - these can be entire appications within a project, or can be limited to certain top-level folders within that application (e.g. a Tracker folder, a top-level Documents folder, a Package in the File Release System, or a Repository). 

In your case, you could create two roles, foo_developer and bar_developer.  Give foo_developer appropriate privileges for all the repositories, trackers, document folders etc. that are associated with the "Foo" project, and likewise for the "Bar" project with bar_developer.  You can of course go for finer-grained control, e.g. creating "foo_viewer" who can view code, and "foo_committer" who can commit to it.  (you will indeed need two distinct repositories if you want to assign different access rights to two different codebases)

"Project Admin" priviliges, by the way, give anyone in that role the power to manage all  this stuff for the project.  Including taking away your admin privileges.

2) Assign USERS to ROLES.  If joeschmoe is a developer on Foo, put him in that role.  If he's actually active in both, simply put him in both roles.  If joeschmoe is already a member, a quick way to put people in roles is on the "User-Role Matrix" tab of the "Permissions" screen.  If you're adding joeschmoe right now, you'll get a chance to assign him to roles right after adding him.

3) Consider defining DEFAULT ACCESS PRIVILEGES.  You can access  this via the "Default Access Permissions" tab of the "Permissions" screen.  You can make your project private, "gated community", or public.  You'll probably want to make it public, so the world can find you.  On the next screen, you'll be able to extend certain of the privileges we talked about in step 1 to users beyond those who get explicit access via their roles.  For instance, you can make your discussion forum readable by all logged-in users.  The default is still to limit everything to role-based acess; if you want to keep all SCM visibility restricted to actual developers, you can definitely do that (it's that way by default).  But maybe you want to let the world view code, but only let your developers make commits.

Some observations on the RBAC system:

* The options are pretty wide - a role can have distinct privileges (read, write, in some cases a distinct create) for any application or top-level folder, multiple roles can have privileges on the same resources, users can be in multiple roles.  It's powerful, but it's a lot of rope...try to keep it as simple as you can.

* People only see what  they're allowed to see.  If a project member isn't given access to see the "Secret Plans" document folder, he'll never know it's there.  It doesn't show up as a grayed-out unclickable link or anything.  When viewing an object's list of associations, he'll only see one if he also has rights to see the object on the other end.

Hope this helps...

  -- Jamie

[mcjamison]

In an attempt to be proactive, I clicked on the "Online Help" link on the new forge and it only opens a new window with no content. 

So I tried the "Sourceforge User Guide" and all it did was lock up Firefox and caused me to have to restart my session. 

ah well, maybe I'll just try some stuff out and hopefully not break the new forge in the process

Hi,
Colin said he saw the help as broken, and was going to file a bug report.  Maybe something got fixed; it's working for me.  Note,  though, that if your browser blocks popups, you'll have to enable them for the forge site. 

There's also an unfortunate behavior of the pop-up help, visible in some browsers: it starts out as a very small window in the lower right of the screen, then resizes itself into about a quarter-screen-size window elsewhere.  In firefox, that first little window in the corner is where the popup is blocked.  The first time I use an SF site, I have to grab  this little window, manually resize it so I can see the "This window has attempted to open a pop-up - click here for more info" text, and click it.  After that, the help will work.

(This is a wierdness of the HTML/javascript generated by RoboHelp, which we're currently using to generate the documentation)

-- Jamie

[Nivuahc]

Thanks!

I just now figured the pop-up blocker thing out for myself (I'm using Firefox)... I figured if I poked around enough it would eventually come to me. 

[Websmurf]

Great to hear such a well spread organisation like VA are helping out on this.

I've had a first basic look at the new forge and it looks very promising!