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

[Ned Slider]

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> 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
> 

Purely from a users (and moderators) PoV, SMF would get my vote IF it 
meets the requirements outlined below. I believe it meets the key 
usability features that our users are looking for from the forums 
software as outlined in this feedback thread:

http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=14921&forum=18

> 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
> 

<snip>

If there's anything I can do to help move this process forward, then I'm 
a willing volunteer - I'm just not sure where I could help out.