Hi,
I took internals off Cc in this reply.
Like all the bold ideas in this thread, that alone would need some
serious planning and commitment.
Technically, it's easy - assuming you'd just install PHPBB / Gitter /
whatever, and not try to invent yet another wheel; but building a
community is hard.
For a start, off the top of my head, you would need to figure out:
- Who is this community aimed at, and how will you attract them to
use it?
- Who will moderate it, and according to what policies?
(Particularly
important if you're branding it as "the official PHP community")
- How will it relate to all the existing community tools (IRC,
StackOverflow Chat, phpug.slack.com, these mailing lists, etc,
etc)?
If you can make it successful, I'm sure it would be a great
asset, but
there's a long and uncertain road between here and there.
Regards,
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
--
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You are totally right.
in my opinion the the community site should be targeted to all the PHP
Community ( PHP Developer / Core Developers ) to ask questions about
PHP, discuss the development of PHP and related topics.
Moderation should be done by a Community Manager and Moderators. ( no
idea for now who these would be, people we vote for or promoted by
core members maybe ? )
For the software i would like to suggest https://flarum.org as well.
"building a community is hard" -- Yes it is. In addition to strategy, as
Rowan mentioned, it takes time, persistent effort, and specialized
skills in community moderation and social media marketing.
My suggestion was that you, as the instigator of this project, take the
lead. Start with the limited goal of building a community of people to
help you with your project. So the scope of conversations at first would
be narrow: how to build the web site and a community board with general
PHP interest. (This email fits the scope, for example.) If you can
"reach critical mass" on some limited goal like this, you should be
proud of a big step forwards.
I said I think PHP needs this because I don't like to use the commercial
systems that co-opted and fragmented our conversations. I read SO,
Reddit etc. but I don't have accounts on anything like that so I can't
participate. Mistrust of commercial social media is growing so maybe
independence could be a selling point in itself. I hope so.
Related success story: We faced difficulties organizing the Yii
Framework community in recent years. Forum traffic on yiiframework.com
was in decline and the community was fragmented over IRC, Slack, Gitter,
SO, Reddit, idk what else. I proposed[1] upgrading from IPB to Discourse
in Dec 2015. We spent more than 2 years arguing about implementation and
eventually CeBe integrated stock Discourse into our new website in Sep
last year. I think it's been a success so far. Traffic is recovering and
key experts are spending time there answering questions so quality is up
too. The recent and very good redesign of yiiframework.com website was
probably also necessary in the success.
So consider Discourse. I think it's clearly the best option in terms of
functionality, user appeal, and minimizing complexity for the webmaster.
Being ruby it's likely to be political but if the team actually
contributing to your project doesn't mind then you can ignore that. Long
term maintenance is critical. Avoid the possibility that a webmaster
departs and nobody wants to take responsibility for what he or she left
behind.
Tom
[1] https://github.com/yiisoft-contrib/yiiframework.com/issues/84
