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JD made an interesting point here about a desire to have the ability to create what I will call a new "project space" at will; a place where we can discuss, document, brainstorm, and implement a programming idea. The idea has merit and it brings to mind a question of what [web] tools are needed for such things? A wiki? A forum? A blog? A run-of-the-mill CMS? I've tried to do this stuff before and invariably things break, and I'd like to figure out why and what to do about it.
The wiki is a great place to brainstorm ideas and document direction. Beyond this I don't know what it has to offer. It's a terrible medium for discussion and it's not ideal for one-way communication "from on high", so for "immutable" docs a wiki is a bad idea.
This is a great place for discussions and to hash out the merits of feature x vs feature y. The problem with forums, however, is once the topic thread leaves the front page it's a dead topic no matter how eloquent. Forums are great for ephemeral conversations and hashing things out, but they beg for someone to do a "formal writeup" after the fact. Forums make terrible reference material.
To be honest I'm not even sure how this could be useful to a development team. It has all the drawbacks of a form and the wiki but none of the gain. And yet it is a tool for getting information out. Does it even apply in a development environment?
This one can work for those immutable documents (but then how is this not a wiki with security?). This gives a person(s) the ability to push out those few settled upon docs, but again, isn't this premature in a development environment? Isn't this the tool to use to distribute the software and have press releases and stuff?
I'm not a major fan of Trac; it doesn't work for me all that well. But the software idea of having a shared list of "action items" and bugs, along with milestones, goals, and deadlines could be handy. I'm not sure to what degree but it could be handy. Now having a browsable repository . . . that's not too shabby either, especially if it displayed the commit logs in a meaningful way.
What things are needed in order to create a project space? Right now I like having a forum (in which only the invited devs can access) and a wiki. Are there other components? Is there a way to join these two into one package (a wiki/forum combo)? Thoughts? Ideas? Flames?
What does he do in his free time, judge the Miss Octogenarian pageant?
In the interest of not
In the interest of not over-complicating things, I think our group would be well-served by a forum and a wiki to manage a project.
Perhaps we could make it customary that the owner [starter] of the thread would summarize the finer points and add them to an appropriate section of the wiki?
I do like the idea of trac, but I think the most important parts of track are the discussions which we'd get out of the forums, and their wiki which we could obviously duplicate
As far as a blog or traditional cms, I can't see a ton of benefit coming from either.
Think Bigger
I wasn't thinking about just our group, but projects in general, and for me the biggest problem is in security. Maybe I want to exclude someone from a project, and not open it up to the entire group. Maybe I want to keep it secret for a silly birthday surprise. Or maybe I just don't want the whole darn world able to read my design notes. Regardless we have the major problem of maintaining two logins, one for the forum and one for the wiki.
I'm not saying for the immediate future we don't do a forum and wiki, but I am suggesting that there may be A Better Way(TM) and perhaps that would be a project unto itself?
Then again, maybe 37signals did all this and I'm too dern cheap to pay for it.
The biggest problem I see is the ability to start a new forum (section?) and wiki per project and maintain security and notifications.
META-PROJECT!!
Yeah, I like the idea of making this a project in itself.
So, where do we document these ideas? :D
Also, any interest making this an appengine project? I have 3 "sites" to make, and everyone can download the dev kit, so I could push it easy enough. This would give us a good chance to move with something made in python, so I think it'd be fun.
I have lots of ideas.... thoughts formulating.
In all honesty how is this
In all honesty how is this not Google Groups? You get a forum, you get "Pages" for documenting stuff, and you can create them whenever and limit participation. It also does this "email" thing I keep hearing about.
I didn't know google groups
I didn't know google groups did pages. That might work afterall.