Re: Time to scale up?

On 7/24/06, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> Am Montag, 24. Juli 2006 16:35 schrieb Marc G. Fournier:
> > One thing that has been talked to death many times, but nobody ever seems
> > to come up with a solution to, is pgFoundry, and how badly it is
> > advertised / promoted ... so software packages over there seem relegated
> > to a sort of 'no mans land' ...
>
> The challenge is to distinguish random garbage from the good, important
> projects on pgFoundry. It seems that what this really comes down to is that
> what need a committee that decides what the
> good/important/maintained/endorsed projects are. Those projects can then get
> more prominent URLs, links, etc.

I'd like to weigh in on our experiences in Joomla-land. We're getting
our forge at forge.joomla.org generously hosted and maintained by VA
Software, and it is a full-blown SourceForge Enterprise Edition on
several machines. At present there are 35,000 registered users on the
forge, and we have 45,000 registered users on the forums. We assume
that most of those accounts are the same people, i.e. a developer with
a forum account, and so on.

The forge is most definitely *not* suitable for your garden variety
end user that is looking for a photo album or some such. SFEE was just
not up to the task for the kinds of wholesale changes that we were
wanting, so we setup extensions.joomla.org instead.

Now, developers have a place to host their projects, and there is also
a place where people can browse for additional packages based on
category - and each item has ratings, comments, and metadata (home
URL, etc). Like a very very user friendly freshmeat.net, but just for
Joomla applications. This site was created specifically for the end
user, and provides the kind of community-driven interaction so you can
see which projects are not ready for prime time, and which ones are
must-haves, etc.

You guys could certainly do that here in PostgreSQL-land, and it
wouldn't force you to make wholesale changes to your PgFoundry site.
There must be community members out there that would love to help
setup and launch such a service, as it would be a huge step regarding
advocacy and the mainstream.

Every time I present Joomla I hear how important the extensions site
is to the community, and I suspect the same thing could be said here
too, if one were made available.

Just my $.02 though, from experience on another project. :-)

-- Mitch