Community System

Mozilla Europe plans to offer hosting to various communities around Europe

This page is to discuss what we want to offer.

The rationale behind this initiative is to provide

  • a reliable hosting service (as opposed to a consumer PC with a xDSL line);
  • unified service among the various communities;
  • a set of services (to be defined, see below);
  • Official logo usage.
0 What are the needs of locale teams and their common goals?

Zbigniew Braniecki wrote:

  • Localizing Mozilla products
  • Promoting Mozilla
  • Deploying Mozilla technologies in companies, organizations and schools

What services could be offered to the communities?

Tristan Nitot wrote:

  • community-moderated Forums for end users to help each other;
  • community-operated FAQ;
  • Mailing list (for those who do not like web-based forums);
  • publishing system in order to publish community-translated or community-written documents
  • Blog system to the home page (mozillazine-like)
Zbigniew Braniecki wrote:
  • forums
  • wikis
  • news pages
  • mailing lists
  • newsgroups
  • blog systems
  • task tracking tools
  • bug tracking tools
  • communication tools between users and localizers
  • IdeaForge - a tool where people can track and forge ideas for promoting
  • web standard evangelism tool
  • emails
  • domains
  • tech documentations
  • gadgets

What software should be used in order to provide these services?

We are quite open about the way we solve our problem. However, there are a few suggestions / requests

  • Free software, preferably under GPL or similar.
  • Runs on Debian GNU/Linux;
  • Secure;
  • Easy to administer;
  • Ability to link to a central membership database;
  • Preferably W3C compliant (not an absolute requisite).
  • With many access levels so maintainers can share the load with others without giving them access to everything

Ways of solving this

Wiki + Forums

A Wiki may be a smart way to deal with the notion of

  • news on the home page
  • easy publication of locally-made / unofficial documents
A wiki could probably not handle the forums in an elegant way. Therefore, a Web-forum piece of software would be needed

DotClear + Forums + CMS

  • DotClear is an excellent blogging tool that may be used for the home page (similar to mozillazine). DotClear is already used for news publication and archiving on mozilla-europe.org. We know it quite well, and Olivier (our Treasurer) is the author of DotClear. DotClear can be localized very easily. (FYI, Olivier has written our CMS too).
  • The Forums software still needs to be decided.
  • The CMS for the community has different requirements than our WWW CMS. We still need to figure out what we want.

Forums + SPIP

  • SPIP is a very interesting, elegant solution for publishing. It includes the notion of news items and background articles. Very easy to install. However, it is not standards-compliant, and I am not sure if it can be easily used in another language than French. There is at least some documentation in English and many other languages, see its Home page.

Civicspace/drupal

  • spreadfirefox.com uses civicspace, which offers some kind of localisability and has blogs, forums and articles from scratch, in a single system. There may be other portal like software systems, but this one has the advantage, that we can leverage both the skillz of the webapps folks over there and share the user experience.
  • I have yet to get the time to see if I can create a toxonomy to devide a cs site into language areas.
  • So I think we could set up the site with drupal, but I came to the conclusion, that translating it is just toooo messy. The english content is distributed in each and every part of the code, AFAICT, and the localisation stuff is database driven. There is no distinction between administration and UI strings, either, so you can't have a "really translate these, and forget those" path. Too much work. Start from scratch. (I'll look in my db tonight to see if I was wrong about en content, though.)