Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi Robert I've had a quick go at creating an account on the new MediaWiki system, was very straight forward. I don't have much experience with web backends but am very interested in helping out with content and general admin of the new site. I've been meaning to create some more detailed information about IOS specific stuff and the new website is a good time to start I think. Only comments so far are that I couldn't find how to add images, I think you need to enable user uploads but I guess this creates the issue with how much do you allow to be uploaded etc. In terms of ideas for the new site I always liked the simple layout of the openframeworks site http://www.openframeworks.cc/ I especially like the feeds at the bottom with information about the latest commits etc, helps people keep up with what's going on. Although their tutorials are difficult to find. I think the main downfall of the current OpenSceneGraph site is that too many topics are presented in a single view. e.g. the Getting Started page has info about multiple platforms, instead we should break things down so it's more like -Getting Started -Linux -Windows -OSX -Android -IOS So that users are getting the information relevant to them, quicker and not posting the same old questions on the forum as much. Perhaps people should design there suggestions for how we categorise and access the content then we can compare ideas. Cheers Tom ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi Thomas, On 3 April 2012 14:39, Thomas Hogarth thomas.hoga...@gmail.com wrote: I've had a quick go at creating an account on the new MediaWiki system, was very straight forward. I don't have much experience with web backends but am very interested in helping out with content and general admin of the new site. Thanks for the offer. I'd very much like to be able to distribute the load and responsibility of maintaining website across a set of engineers, we'll need to wait to see who steps forward before we can divvy up various responsibilities. I've been meaning to create some more detailed information about IOS specific stuff and the new website is a good time to start I think. Excellent :-) Only comments so far are that I couldn't find how to add images, I think you need to enable user uploads but I guess this creates the issue with how much do you allow to be uploaded etc. I've just worked out how to enable uploads, and tested it out on the page you modified - I've uploaded a 2:1 whole earth image and it looks to work fine. Feel free to see if you can remove it/replace it. In terms of ideas for the new site I always liked the simple layout of the openframeworks site http://www.openframeworks.cc/ I especially like the feeds at the bottom with information about the latest commits etc, helps people keep up with what's going on. Although their tutorials are difficult to find. Thanks for the link. The openframeworks website is both quite simple but seems to have multiple places for the same thing which makes it a little more visually cluttered than it needs be. The feeds is an interesting idea - we try to kind of nurture this with the front page of the old website but it's never updated often enough to justify it. Having a github feed would ensure that there is pretty steady supply of news. I guess tracking tweets of various prominent OSG contributors/users would be useful as well. I haven't personally dabbled in twitter/facebook/google+ yet, and still don't feel too inclined to generate even more opportunities to air my inability to spell! Others are welcome to jump in a fill this void :-) I think the main downfall of the current OpenSceneGraph site is that too many topics are presented in a single view. e.g. the Getting Started page has info about multiple platforms, instead we should break things down so it's more like -Getting Started -Linux -Windows -OSX -Android -IOS So that users are getting the information relevant to them, quicker and not posting the same old questions on the forum as much. Perhaps people should design there suggestions for how we categorise and access the content then we can compare ideas. Having a a layout guideline that works well is essential for getting the website to work well. We'll need to decide this reasonably soon as this guides how the content gets filled out. I haven't formed any opinions on the right way so am open to suggestions. I do wonder if with having a new and more powerful wiki would open the door to better community content and hopefully... documentation. I'm wondering whether we can push much of the documentation onto the wiki and then have the main website act as a place holder for downloads/gallery and as gateway to forum/mailing list/wiki. Having a wiki with it's log in user account, and potentially CMS like Joomla with it's own user accounts, and the forum and mailing list both with their own user accounts will be rather messy. So I wonder if it might be possible to have just one account on the main site and then have options for enabling wiki/forum/mailing list activation. Is this possible? Robert. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi Robert I do wonder if with having a new and more powerful wiki would open the door to better community content and hopefully... documentation. I'm wondering whether we can push much of the documentation onto the wiki and then have the main website act as a place holder for downloads/gallery and as gateway to forum/mailing list/wiki. I do like the idea of a using the wiki for all tutorials and documentation, having a simpler system will make users more inclined to contribute and correct information. Then as you say, the main site can be a more polished portal for downloads, forum, release news etc. Joomla should help make this quite easy to keep updated from what I've been reading. Having a wiki with it's log in user account, and potentially CMS like Joomla with it's own user accounts, and the forum and mailing list both with their own user accounts will be rather messy. So I wonder if it might be possible to have just one account on the main site and then have options for enabling wiki/forum/mailing list activation. Is this possible? Linking of all the accounts sounds like a good feature too. I found these regarding MediaWiki, Joomla and phpBB http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AuthJoomla http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PHPBB/Users_Integration They seem to show it's doable but will probably require some work. I'll keep reading up on this stuff, and think about layouts etc. Cheers Tom ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
You might also consider whther Joomla has Wiki and forum modules of its own, that could share a common registration/login system. Drupal (a Joomla competitor, also Open Source) has basic and advanced wiki and forum modules that would leverage off Drupal's own core system, rather than having to integrate external modules. I'm admin'ed PHPBB before and its not all that fun to integrate with other systems. -- Chris 'Xenon' Hanson, omo sanza lettere. xe...@alphapixel.com http://www.alphapixel.com/ Training • Consulting • Contracting 3D • Scene Graphs (Open Scene Graph/OSG) • OpenGL 2 • OpenGL 3 • OpenGL 4 • GLSL • OpenGL ES 1 • OpenGL ES 2 • OpenCL Digital Imaging • GIS • GPS • Telemetry • Cryptography • Digital Audio • LIDAR • Kinect • Embedded • Mobile • iPhone/iPad/iOS • Android ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
[osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi All, Occasionally over the past 6 months we've discussed moving server and services from the present server, but as yet nothing concrete has happened. I'm now ready to knuckle down and make it happen. However, there is still decisions to make and work to do. This I need both your suggestions, feedback on how well certain server technologies work for you, and time in migrating content across once we've got the new website and services setup. One the version control front my plan is to migrate from subversion to git, and myself taking ownership of the openscenegraph over on github would probably be easiest to do in terms of work from myself and community. Given we have plenty of other work to handle in server migration having one of the tasks happen smoothly is good, and is something we should be able to do rapidly. I tagged openscenegraph-3.1.2 dev release last Friday, so this could well be the last activity I need to make in Subversion! While migrating across to use github's openscenegraph is easy, there are other projects that our current server provides - VirtualPlanetBuilder is the main one, this I will probably need to manage the migration of, and my intention is to sit it alongside openscenegraph in github. There are also other smaller Tracs/subversion projects hosted like as part of osgforge.org : osglua, osgpython, osgdotnet, osgtutorial and osgProducer. There is very little activity or any discussion about these that I'm aware of - so my assumption that these are largely inactive/dormant. To keep life simple I'd like those who are responsible for these projects, or would like to assume responsibility for them to step forward and tell us what you'd like to with them. Please come forward now if you want to take on these, otherwise assume that these little ancillary projects will disappear. For mailing lists and forum we currently don't use the present server so these services need no changes. All we need to do is keep links to these on the new server/website when it goes live. Now we get to the big task before us - new server and web technologies for the new website and services. I would like to be able to provide a professional looking website with the main elements easily accessible for end users and for easy for the website maintainers to provide content for and manage. I would also like a section of the website to remain a wiki/enable community provided content. A wik/user content opens the door to spammers using the website for their own nefarious deeds so we'll need a robust user account system and system for monitoring commits from the community by review my wiki administrators so we can catch the spammers before they do too much damage. I'd like the user account system to be easier to manage than the present one - needing the server admin to grant permissions adds extra work for everyone. In terms of server I have a Dreamhost account that includes full hosting so moving the OSG website to dreamhost is fine by me - currently I use Dreamhost's Mailman support to provide the osg-users mailing list and the blog.openscenegraph.org is hosted by Dreamhost. Dreamhost allows use to install various web technologies for our hosted websites, technologies like MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla and Tracs amoung others. I'm open to suggestion on what technology to go for, so please step forward now with feedback on various CMS techologies you've used and what think would work well for the OSG. I'm also no web/server amin person, I'm user of these systems rather than admin so I'm having to learn about them, and right now feel rather overwhelmed by all the options and terminology so feel free to provide links to good resources about learning about these. Also if you've seen other software project websites that you feel work really well and would be worth learning from please come forward with links and tell us what parts work well or work less well. Once we've got a short listed set of technologies I'll get these set up/work with other to get them set up and then we can start experimenting with website mock ups to test things. I can set up an openscenegraph.org subdomain for this purpose or just reuse the openscenegraph.com for this while we are experimenting. Once we've decided upon the tech we can then progress onto migrating the existing openscenegraph.org content across. The layout and style of the website will be partly determined by what is possible with the tech we choose, but we'll still have a pretty open hand to do what we want. The current website looks OK, but it's not great, I think we can do better, but not being a graphics artist type I'm not one to really push forward a great new look and layout. Here, again I welcome suggestions and direct help in refining things. When populating the new website we may be able to migrate quick a bit of content but also I think it's time for us to write some new content - many of even the main pages haven't been updated for years.
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
On 02.04.2012 13:45, Robert Osfield wrote: Hi All, [...] In terms of server I have a Dreamhost account that includes full hosting so moving the OSG website to dreamhost is fine by me - currently I use Dreamhost's Mailman support to provide the osg-users mailing list and the blog.openscenegraph.org is hosted by Dreamhost. Dreamhost allows use to install various web technologies for our hosted websites, technologies like MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla and Tracs amoung others. I'm open to suggestion on what technology to go for, so please step forward now with feedback on various CMS techologies you've used and what think would work well for the OSG. Don't use Redmine stick to Trac, the biggest reason for this is administration remains easy with trac-admin. You can easily backup, migrate and configure each project while multiple projects are still possible with minimal effort. Compared Redmine with Trac, Redmine's backup and configuration is a nightmare as you have to dump mysql databases manually, backup uploaded files separately, etc. More over, you are not able to migrate single projects. Some Redmine settings apply to all projects, the wiki does not allow custom image resolutions for embedded images due to a XSS related bug. Some configuration is done in-source e.g. custom routes, so software updates will overwrite your settings then. I say this as we are currently using Redmine for our project (openwalnut.org also using OSG) and I am very unhappy with it. BTW, we also encounter problems with spammers (buybacklinkz.com etc) even recaptcha plugins for Redmine won't protect you and you have to use manual account activation as a last resort. please ignore clumsy english as I am in (a?) hurry Mathias -- Institut für Informatik Universität Leipzig Johannisgasse 26, 04103 Leipzig Phone: +493419732283 ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi All, I am currently looking at Joomla, while I read up about it, has anyone else out there worked with Joomla? Thoughts? If Joomla doesn't look to daunting I'll try Dreamhosts One Click install and put up something basic on openscenegraph.com and see how I get on. Robert. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
And the next step in my experimentation/learning experience - I've got Joomla installed on: http://www.openscenegraph.com/ No OpenSceneGraph specific content yet kinda run of working day to get much more done right now. I'll see if I can get a banner up before I disappear for the evening. Robert. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
Hi All, As a test of Dreamhost server/services I have put up MediaWiki site for us to experiment with: http://wiki.openscenegraph.com I haven't ever worked with MediaWiki before let alone set one up so it's all rather a new experience. If I've done something dumb, or neglected to set things up right just let me know. At this stage I think it would be appropriate for us to experiment with creating user accounts and then looking just creating a few pages, uploading images, videos with the purpose of testing rather than building a new community section of the website. Let me know how you get on. I'd also like to know from users who would be happy to help manage/administer/work as editors/reviewers for any final wiki we plump for. Robert. ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
Re: [osg-users] Website, Version control and Server migration
On 04/02/2012 10:57 AM, Robert Osfield wrote: Hi All, I am currently looking at Joomla, while I read up about it, has anyone else out there worked with Joomla? Thoughts? Hi, Robert, We use Joomla for pretty much all of our web presence here in our lab, as well as for some additional work we do with the UCF programming team. The basic web stuff is pretty straightforward in Joomla. We've also written some Joomla extensions to support the programming team work (we run programming contests completely within the Joomla environment). One thing we've not really done is host a software repository as part of the site itself, but I don't think that would be difficult. Feel free to take a look at our sites if you like: http://www.irl.ucf.edu http://www.ucfprogrammingteam.org You might also want to check out joomlashack.com for templates and extensions. --J ___ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
