[CentOS-devel] forums + portal for {lang}.centos.org sites

[Karanbir Singh]

Hi,

Earlier in the evening today Ralph, Fabian and I had a chat about the 
present state of the language subsites. This email sort of summarises 
the main issue ( s/w ).

We seem to have run into a slight technical hitch with punbb/fluxbb. 
They dont support LDAP as a backend. And we had decided a few months 
back that all new rollouts must have ldap backend so we can rollin 
CentOS-DS / openldap based backend.

So we need to look at alternatives, and since the primary focus of these 
international sites is going be forums : Here is a shortlist ( if there 
is anything else that people are aware of, please add to this list )
- phpBB
- SMF
- Fudforum
- phorum
- fluxbb

Requirements:
- Must be able to scale ( couple of hundred thousand msgs )
- Must be able to handle ldap auth ( if it cant, whats involved in 
writing the ldap-auth portion )
- Must address the specific requirements raised by the present 
www.centos.org forum users ( Can you please fill this section in ? )
- Must support all languages we need ( pure utf8 support would be good )
- Secure
- Skin'able

Nice to have:
- Capable of running multiple instances from a single deployment
- responsive community :D

Things we will need to do:
- Decide on what s/w to use.
- Give the ArtWork people enough time to get the look & feel sorted.
- Migrate newbb forums from www.centos.org to $system ( hey, english is 
a language too :D ).
- Migrate fr.centos.org into the final s/w
- setup {de/es/ja/it/pt_br}.centos.org

Actions:
Ralph and Fabian are going to work on setting up a test ldap server, 
once that is online we will then start by installing into our 
test-vm-farm the various s/w to eval them.

If anyone would like to help, please feel free to jump right in.

I'll setup a wiki page for this issue, which might be a good place to 
track progress.

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq