Joomla! Forge Q&A

[Boomzilla]

Ah Jamie beat me to it!

Popup blockers will prevent the on-line help from being launched. I just overrode mine while clicking on the on-line help link and all worked correctly (I've closed out the bug report I raised in the VA Support project on the site).

Col

[hotnuts21]

Colin thanks for the reply to my question

Keep up the good work.
rgds
Paul

[kenmcd]

Mambozip.com/joomlaya.com has got a good start on categorization.

It may be better to support Joomlaya.com by submitting links, etc.
They "get it" - to a point.
The commercial nature of http://www.Joomlaya.com may actually drive a more usable result.

Users need ONE place to find CMMs.
I find the categories at Joomlaya.com still somewhat limited.
These are not USERS categories.
These are DEVELOPERS categories.
Developers do not understand the difference.

Look at the categories on the Mambo CMM Resources list.
This is an attempt at USERS categories.
MamboForge is totally clueless.
Those are developers forge categories, not USERS categories.
SourceForge (as wonderful as it is) is a collection of developer categories.
It is not USERS categories.

To make Joomla the easiest to use and most popular CMS on the planet requires making it easiest for the USERS, whomever they are . . . newbie, corp. do-be, anyone.
Including the forge.

The challenge in online usability is making the most complex sites easy to use by the most inexperienced users.
This is very hard to do.
One of my favorite quotes is from a previous American President (Abraham Lincoln).
"Sorry about the length of this letter. I did not have the time to write a shorter one."
It may not be the exact quote, but the idea is the same.
It is very hard, and very time consuming, to make things more simple.
But it is worth it.
It expands the universe of potential users.
Powerful, but usable - very hard to do - and infinitely unique.

[Boomzilla]

Thanks for the input and recommendations regarding categorization. This is very important for VA - not just for developer.joomla.or, but for use by all users of SourceForge. I appreciate the time you took to provide this level of detail.

Col

[Beat]

Look at the categories on the Mambo CMM Resources list.
This is an attempt at USERS categories.
MamboForge is totally clueless.
Those are developers forge categories, not USERS categories.
SourceForge (as wonderful as it is) is a collection of developer categories.
It is not USERS categories.

Hi Ken,
You made a very nice list over there. Could go as is into the Joomla main site.

I would love that the SF/Joomla integration of SF be able to generate automatically a such one. It could then be completed by user reviews and votes, so that the most useful/best quality components get listed at the begin of each category, and maybe in the "top used components". Alternatively a list maintainer could do that to start with. The downloads counter of SF is a very precious indicator which could be put to use .

Hi Colin,
Great work at VA for the new forge. Love it. Thanks for your support and presence here.
One small feedback: the general authorizations for the areas could have two small word added: "minimum authorization level" around authorization (I understood it as "default" in the admin UI, would have saved me two hours trying to understand why the particular authorization was not taken into account.

One detail question:
Could it be possible to include into the default template for the projects, into the trackers, besides the default bugs-tracker, also the features-request tracker, so that all projects get it (saw that quite  a few, as Joomla!, also added it) ?

The features-requests tracker (along with the public commenting feature and maybe a voting function)  is a powerful OS PM-tool.

Hope it's not already asked for (sorry, finishing coding CB RC2, I'm not Abraham Lincoln , but still don't have the time to read all).

Thanks to both of you for your great work,
Beat

[guilliam]

@Boomzilla, hello! "thank you" again for the efforts and resources over our new forge. as already mentioned, almost anyone (even the dev core members) are in the learning curve with the new forge that we have.

questions and suggestions:

1. can the project listing view of 15 items(currently) be adjusted by users to something they can adjust in some parameters?

2. i have posted new projects(around 12 hours ago) how long does it usually take for the forge admin to approve or disapprove proposed/newly listed projects?

-guilliam

[Nivuahc]

1.) Screenshots area

I remember a while back when Sourceforge added the "Screenshots" link to projects and how nice that was. It made it much easier to decide whether or not I wanted to try a particular project release or not.

Any chance we could have something like that on the Joomla! Forge?

For example, the three templates I have in my project, I've included a thumbnail with the file release so that a user can see what it is that they're getting before downloading the actual template. Having a thumbnail in my file release inflates my "Downloads" number as each click on that thumbnail is seen as a "download" (at least I think that's what happens).

A "Screenshots" area for each release would be especially helpful for the users who are perusing the forge looking for components/modules/templates, and it would be helpful to the project administrators so that an accurate count of the number of downloads would be available.

Any chance of implementing something like this on our new Forge?

2.) Forge usage

As a person who has yet to release anything but a few templates on my project page, I'm wondering if it's actually worthwile to do so. The new Forge is awesome. It's a wonderful tool for developers. The repository, the project administration, all of those things that make it so great... they do little more than offer a place for templates to be uploaded and downloaded... just storage. And with the amount of development that goes into a template 'Project', it seems like using up forge resources to house templates might be placing a burden on actual projects that are developed by a team. From my experience, template development involves one person, with occasional input from someone here or there, and they don't really fall under the "Project" definition.

Maybe I'm just seeing this from my point of view alone, and haven't thought it through completely. It seems, though, that the forge and the users would be better suited with an area where template developers can simply upload their templates and end users can download them. All a template needs is

a) here's a template
b) here's a description
c) here's a screenshot

Everything else that the forge offers isn't really put to use.

News? On a template? 

Here, let me write your next news article for your template release:

A new template was released today! You can download it here! It's the bestest template ever!

I don't know, maybe it's my cynical side coming out but the forge, as it is, for templates is like buying a Rolls Royce just so you can have the shiny headlights.

I appreciate the Rolls Royce, I just feel like maybe there are other people who really need the functionality that the car offers and it's doing me no good just sitting in my driveway. I do get to play with those headlights though *flicker* *flicker*

[Nivuahc]

Last question of the morning: Are we ever going to change the site title from

SourceForge : Welcome

to

Joomla! Developer : Welcome

(or something else with the new logo?)

Just curious 

[Beat]

Agree that screenshots would be great. Actually the project home-page should be proportioned the reverse way: lots of space to describe the project, its news, and include screenshots, and a little space to show project activity graphs .

Agree also that it's an overkill for just templates, which would be better holding separately in another forge, or more simply in a Joomla DOCMan or Remository component (which allow both categorization and for DOCMan at least, to include images/screenshots in the description). I don't know for Remository, but DOCMan has a frontend file upload facility and a review/publisher function.

[Boomzilla]

Bunch of good questions this morning (well, morning for me!). I'll respond over the next few hours as I get increasing amounts of coffee inside me:

Re: Changing SourceForge : Welcome to Joomla! Developer : Welcome

Yes. I've raised a tracker item to have this change made. We'll be switching out the entire SourceForge home page for a Joomla-based home page integrated with SourceForge. At that time we'll shift to the new logo, better layout, additional tools etc.

Re: Project Homepages

We're working on customization of project home pages. i.e. move/remove graphs, add more text, images, Wiki-as-a-project-home-page etc.
You can approximate screenshots - add a linked application to the project tool bar that points at the URL in the document manager of the screens you want to show. OR build a little app that accesses screen shots from the doc manager via the SOAP API and displays them within the SourceForge home page as a linked application.

[ibnhafsun]

Sorry if this was asked before:

Does it have localized interfaces?

I'd like to see it in spanish.

[Boomzilla]

Re: Localized interfaces:

This version of SourceForge is available in English (American English at that!) and Japanese. The UI is fully I18N and can be L10N'd.
Anyone interested in localizing SourceForge into another language please PM me.

Thanks!

Col

[Boomzilla]

More answers:

Re: can the project listing view of 15 items(currently) be adjusted by users to something they can adjust in some parameters?

Yes  top right of the Public Projects and All Projects tab (within  My Workspace > My Projects) you see the "Items per page" icon (looks like a bunch of small rectangles...) - you can select the number of projects to display. Default, as you have discovered, is 15.

Re: how long does it usually take for the forge admin to approve or disapprove proposed/newly listed projects?

There are a number of site admins. Experience has shown that project get approved quite swiftly (within a few minutes typically). There are no project requests in the approval queue (2 Oct 11:30am PST (GMT+8)) so we've either approved your project (or rejected it if the name was not meaningful etc - but in that case you'd get an e-mail rejection note from the system).

Col

[kaizen]

Is it possible to get an RSS or XML feed of new projects a la the developer front page?  I know I'm constantly looking at what's new and it would be nice to incorporate this as a feature if it isn't already available.

[Boomzilla]

Yes - this will be included when we roll out a Joomla! instance as a replacement for the SourceForge home page.

Col

[kaizen]

Yes - this will be included when we roll out a Joomla! instance as a replacement for the SourceForge home page.

Col

That's great news, the newforge is full of features I'm still discovering!  I can't believe I've been using it since it opened and only discovered the diff features last week.

Thanks for the reply.

[gsbe]

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!!!!

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[micheas]

Eek,

the signal to noise ration on this thread is pretty low, but this seems like the place to ask my question.

Is there anyway I can add details to someone else's bug report?

I ask because Joomla is not looking for more members (which I understand) But, there are times when I have details to add to someone else's artifact, and all I can do is A) post a duplicate bug or B) post in the forums and hope that it gets picked up (It seems to, but it seems a bit crazy to have to jump to the forums to post info about an artifact.

[LeGaS]

When will the Forge has got an RSS feed?

[krayc]

What would be useful, (and I can imagine it has already been suggested) is the ability to filter out, projects that have released no files.

krc

[dutler]

How does one deploy a forge? Ive gandered at SF, gforge and the XOOPS Module Development Forge. I do not know.... I and several clients use Joomla for CMS, I now the basics of version control.... but Im not even sure where to start on deploying a forge or out own.

can ya throw me a bone?
-dutler