Hi Boris, "Magnolia employees don't need/use the forum, do they?" I meant, to "ask" questions rather than "answering" those. I assume that most of Magnolia employees have a greater knowledge than most of the 3rd party developer. In the end, I assume that most people who would need a good forum/f&q would be 3rd party developpers as these are great in numbers.
I understand that improving the forum itself sounds like a good idea. However if you look into how complex SE f&q are behind the curtain (see the faq http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/7931/faq-for-stack-exchange-sites), it would be a huge task to try to get any close to how good their product is. They took several years to build this tool, hence I doubt we could get any close in just a few months, or even a whole year. Hence if you guys at Magnolia don't do it, I doubt anyboby from the community will be able to. I believe there'd be far too much work to put in. But as you say this could be a new challenge for Magnolia, as you point out "java world doesn't have a great open source forum" so maybe it's a niche to get into. On the other hand I'd be carefull about another point: Magnolia is a CMS, not a forum/f&q system. Magnolia does not try to do all sorts of other things & it's appreciated I believe. For instance, Magnolia is not trying to be an e-commerce system. "I am also a bit reluctant to shift the bulk of our community work to a new owner": That point seems the most important really. I have researched points related to this and found a lot of intereting info. See below. The licence, this is definitely something to investing further but it seems very good: "all user-generated content in the Stack Exchange Network would be given back to the community under a Creative Commons license. All those great Stack Overflow questions, answers, and comments, so generously contributed by all of you, are licensed under cc-wiki (also known as cc-by-sa)" Read more: http://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Data dumps: SE provides public data dumps, you (Magnolia the company) could simply access them and back them up if you are worried that SE could lose or erase the data. Quoting their website: "The community has selflessly provided all this content in the spirit of sharing and helping each other. In that very same spirit, we are happy to return the favor by providing a database dump of public data. [...] All public Stack Exchange sites are now included in the data dump". Read more: http://blog.stackexchange.com/2009/06/stack-overflow-creative-commons-data-dump/ http://data.stackexchange.com/ StackExchange API: You (Magnolia the company) can use the API to write an app. ie. Display content from our related SE f&q on Magnolia CMS website? FYI: most of the API seems to be read-only, quoting SE's website regarding write access: "Starting with version 2.1, the Stack Exchange API provides limited support for writing to sites in the Stack Exchange network", see http://api.stackexchange.com/docs/write Read more: http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/08/22/stack-exchange-api-the-good-and-the-bad/ http://api.stackexchange.com Other similar companies/technologies to Magnolia CMS are already using SE: Drupal : http://drupal.stackexchange.com/ Magento : http://magento.stackexchange.com/ Joomla : http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/58842/joomla To know more precisely if this is a good option we can also get in touch directly with SE: [email protected] Sorry for the massive amount of text ! :-s -- Context is everything: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=3159bdee-2ce9-4c00-8f6f-86dc2b8e0ab5 ---------------------------------------------------------------- For list details, see http://www.magnolia-cms.com/community/mailing-lists.html Alternatively, use our forums: http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[email protected]> ----------------------------------------------------------------
