[CentOS-devel] Forum overhaul

[Marcus Moeller]

Dear Russ.

>> As an end user, I would like to know if there is any forward progress on
>> doing something about the CentOS forums?
>
> whatever forward means --
>
> You don't like it for various reasons; a post in the first
> Forum thread listed from a centos devel was made, and no trial
> implementation indicating satisfaction with the criteria was
> made that I can see
>
> I would add [with the benefit of time and knowing what is
> happening in the broader Open Source world] to z00dax'
> comment, that it should support federated authentication
> [ldap,OpenID, whatever]; show a low attack surface history at
> the CVE; be in active maintenance or better, development; be
> in a language permitting addon extensibility without having to
> 'marry' the darn thing; and permit 'static' top pages to
> address 'slashdotting'.  Does it integrate well with puppet,
> mailman, and stock CentOS tools; is it Free and Open Source
> software using CentOS stock supporting packages?
>
>> This apparently has came up time and again, with various examples being
>> given of the deficiencies of the existing setup (depending on your point
>> of view).
>
> I saw chatter and grumbling between people who like 'pull
> content' such as forums
>
>> As near as I can tell the general consensus seems to be
>> 'yes, something needs to be done'
>
> And the mice voted to bell the cat.  If all noses are of equal
> value and no cost is placed on voting and no cost is imputed
> to the effort needed to make changes, then sure those choosing
> to speak as to a proposed change (without doing anything to
> further it) I suppose there is 'general consensus' in favor of
> said change.  But all I see from the talkers, is talk; nothing
> prevents any of the talkers from doing in a sandbox somewhere,
> so far as I know.

Besides just talking, let's take a look at the facts:

Sample implementation has already been done. LDAP bind works fine,
User creation is not possible from the application, so there needs to
be coded something for.

We have written a migration script to port newbb content to phpbb
which is documented well and can be found here:

http://wiki.centos.org/WebsiteVer2/forums/newbb_to_phpbb

phpBB theming process has been started, but stalled a bit as we are
moving forward to a common visual style:

http://wiki.centos.org/ArtWork/Style/Web/Default

If you got any further questions concerning what has already been
done, feel free to ask.

Best Regards
Marcus