[olpc-help] Site maintenance and upgrades

Thu Jan 24 17:13:49 EST 2008

On Jan 24, 2008 6:46 AM, Anita Lewis <a.lewis at linuxbasics.org> wrote:

> Question: Will the mailing list/forum connection still work?  I mostly
> read and write from community-support at lists.laptop.org.
>

Good question, sad answer. Short form: no. :(

Longer form: The only solution to list <-> forum syncing is the mail2forum
package, available only on phpbb2. phpbb2 is becoming depricated (version 3
was recently released) but more importantly, it is hard to maintain. By the
nature of its design we had to choose security over that functionality.
phpbb requires editting the core PHP files to add features, of which over a
dozen were done for the olpc.osuosl.org forum to get it to the state it is
in today, including the portal page and the mailing list software
integration. This means when a bug if found and a new version released, it
is extremely likely to require manually backporting those fixes to our, now
unique, code. This is an avoidable nature of phpbb.

In trying to think longer term when organizing the merge with olpchelp.org's
forum with our own, the software we used was re-evaluated. They used
vBulletin, a popular but closed-source solution, and we were on phpbb2.
Setting a hard requirement of using an Open Source solution, maintainability
and security (our new software distinguished between extensions and core
code, making updating one or the other trivially easy) won out over the
fairly awesome mailing list magic. We decided take the migration as an
opportunity to swap out forum packages. There is a thread on olpc-open@
discussion the situation. Ironically, it is also on the Open category of the
forum for those interested.

Frankly, this stinks for me, too. I enjoyed being able to have email as my
gateway to support questions, but I also like keeping our forum from getting
hacked. In doubling our userbase of donors and XO enthusiast that can help
questions under one website umbrella we had to lose the ability to access
that community through email. I think we made the right decision in the end.

If there are any php developers that would be interested in coordinating
with me to write an extension, please contact me. We are using the Vanilla
[0] forum software (26 hours and counting to the new site!!) and it should
be quite doable, but it takes more programming time than I have to tackle
alone.

[0] http://getvanilla.com

-- 
Michael Burns * Student
Open Source {Education} Lab
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-support/attachments/20080124/43433501/attachment-0001.htm 