(response to Draft O: 2004-06-14 – but also see  my earlier response  “Where we are at and how we can deal with it” which I’ve put in my folder - you can see it here

The site was re-opened  just over two years ago after being largely down from the end of Januaary 2004  until mid November 2004.  During that period although the site existed and I had provided it with quite a large amount of (passsive) content,   there was no forum and no way for us to keep up any sort of commentary of our own on world events.  The site was also closed to membership.  This was because we were

(a)    trying  to establish it with a blog-like forum (the idea was to modify the CMFboard software so that it worked more like a blog

(b)    trying to establish a folder structure that was well designed and would tie in nicely with discussions on the forum/blog

(c)    trying to develop some end-user documentation which would encourage members to make use of the plone software to submit material for publication etc

(d)    trying  to train-up the core members of LS, in their general computer skills and also in their plone skills.

(e)    trying to retrieve as much of the material from the old site as possible and rebuild that site so that it would be viewable on the new site.

Since reopening, our main achievement is that we have gained experience in writing our own material on the forum (and there is some excellent original material there). However we have not “taken off” in terms of breaking into the blogosphere. And there are other connected problems related to functioning as a small group.

I believe that this was Arthur’s concern when he wrote the Draft 0 of “Site Technical Plans”.   He saw the minimal requirements for re-opening the site as being (a) having a blog style of forum, (b) having an established folder structure  within which we could place material around which the blog-style discussion could be based and (c) having end-user documentation which would introduce new members to making use of their folders to store and submit material - and also to give them some understanding how the site works.

Currently we haven’t  achieved those things.

We now need to develop a plan to move forward.  I’ll try to outline the issues as I see them.

(1) The  current state of the forum and future options

 The following is an account of current issues related to the problems we face in terms of forum/blog software.  These problems are interconnected to the issue of migrating the site from Pone 2.0.5 to a higher version of Plone (ideally Plone 2.5)

Arthur is right that we are largely “talking to ourselves”.  I’d say that we have around 200 regular readers and that the rest of the traffic to the forum is accidental blow-ins from google searches for words such as “dialectics” , “Hegel”, “Marx” etc etc. Most of these visitors  probably never come back and never look at any more than the one forum message that they are taken to. 

Our real traffic would come from being interconnected with other blogs on the internet via track-backs and RSS feeds.  Currently we haven’t  been able to  get CMFboard working in this way.

Another issue is the way in which forum-style discussions are relatively easily disrupted by the people like dalek, bpors etc.  If we were able to work as bloggers, the debate following each major post would be available (by clicking on comments) but we wouldn’t be in a situation in which irritating posts were given almost the same status as more substantive pieces.  

Blogging would require us to work differently (but I’ll write something about that separately).

The Problem(s)  of CMFBoard specifically

Firstly it isn’t being developed any more.  The website www.cmfboard.org  has been dead for about 18 months.  There has however been a little bit of recent work in patching it to run on Plone 2.1 (http://dev.plone.org/collective/browser/CMFBoard/branches) .  I have it running on a Plone 2.1 site  (www.scienceissues.net) but haven’t been able to get subscriptions working.

 LS currently runs on Plone 2.0.5 .  It would be very nice to migrate to Plone 2.5 however currently CMFboard will not run on Plone 2.5.

I think we should move away from CMFBoard  ASAP, but even if we do that we will still need to be running on a version of Plone which will allow us to move all our old forum postings there.  One option would be migrating our material to Ploneboard  and turning that forum (the Ploneboard one ) into an archive (ie people could read the old material but not post to Ploneboard). See below (under the heading “Ploneboard”)  for information about CMFBoard  to Ploneboard migration.

Moving away from CMFboard is a necessity  because  it doesn’t meet our needs in terms of interconnecting with the blogosphere and in any case will probably never run on any version of Plone  higher than 2.1/2.2.

Alternatives to CMFBoard

There are some possible alternatives but at the moment there seem to be problems with all of them.

Quills

The most promising candidate seems to be Quills. 

Release notes for Quills 1.5:

Features including, but not limited to:

• Syndication feeds per topic and per author, as well as (ANDed) combinations of each.
• Enhanced trackback sending facility, via plonetrackback, that allows you to send an arbitrary number of trackback pings per post (and records URLs that have already been pinged).
• WeblogTopics are no more - replaced by the standard Plone subject keywords. This makes WeblogEntry topics searchable in the catalog.
• (Hopefully) Fixed MetaWeblogAPI support - well, it should be better, at least.
• Numerous UI fixes.
• New portlet_tag_cloud.pt in the skins for (somewhat experimental), um, tag clouds ;-).

.

Unfortunately Quills 1.5 is only an experimental release (as made clear on the plone.org site  http://plone.org/products/quills/releases/1.5  ) :

“This is not a final release. Experimental releases should only be used for testing and development. Do not use these on production sites, and make sure you have proper backups before installing

There is an earlier, apparently stable (?) version (Quills 0.9.1). It has been tested on Plone 2.1.3 and 2.1.2. However I have not been able to install it on either of these versions of Plone and there does not seem to be any documentation to help me with either installing it or learning how to use it.

See the Quills project page (http://plone.org/products/quills) where the features of more recent (still being tested) versions Quills are listed as:

• Archival entry paths. Access blog archives via standard paths such as http://example.com/myblog/archive/2004/04/06/
• Topics with descriptions and images
• BloggerAPI support for remote posting
• Track Back Pings
• Visitors can leave comments on blog entries, optionally require registration to limit "Comment Spam"
• Unlimited Authors, Blogs per Author, and Authors per Blog
• Site-wide blog aggregator
• Blog Planets for groups
• Multiple topics and advanced topic searching, with simple URIs such as http://example.com/myblog/topics/work/project/

The person behind Quills development is  Tom von Schwerdtner  .  I’ve written to him with some questions, but so far no reply.

Several people involved with the Quills project appear to have established advanced test versions running on Plone 2.5 

eg see

 http://tomster.org/blog

http://www.eife-l.org/Members/mvancoillie

more info:

http://theploneblog.org/

http://theploneblog.org/search?SearchableText=quills 

also:

see this search for "quills" on the plone blog (which itself seems to run on Quills 

blogger API and quills etc:

I have joined the quills developer email list in the hope that I might see something helpful, but the material there is (not surprisingly) almost totally over my head.

quills-dev mailing list
http://lists.etria.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/quills-dev

Plone Board

Marshall Meyer who runs the plone site: http://livemodern.com/ which was based around a bunch of CMFBoard forums, put some money into developing ploneboard and  recently announced success in that project:

“Recently we engaged a software developer to write new forum software
for LiveModern.  That project is done, and we are currently in the
process of converting the years of forum content to the new format.
We hope to have the LiveModern website completely updated in October.

It will be much faster, and offer a platform to introduce many more
site improvements in the coming years.  Thanks for your patience.”

He then upgraded his site to Plone2.5.  Part of the above project was to write software to migrate CMFBoard postings to Ploneboard and livemodern.com has now transferred its old CMFboard  forums to Ploneboard.

However I don’t see Ploneboard as the way to go for us (a) because it isn’t blogging software and doesn’t have the features required for becoming integrated into the blogosphere  (b) because I have installed it on a test site and I  think it has even less flexibility than CMFboard (however I only had a cursory look) and (c) because when I  took a look at the technical discussion list on livemodern.com I saw that the transition has been full of problems and many users have expressed dissastisfaction.

http://livemodern.com/forums/website

grafware offers migration from CMFboard to Ploneboard http://www.grafware.com/services.html. However I believe that 6feetup would also be able to do it.

The main reason we might consider wanting to do this (ie move from CMFboard to plone board)  would be if we decided that it was best to migrate all the way to Plone 2.5 immediately and use Ploneboard while waiting for Quills to mature. Another option is to migrate as far as Plone 2.1 and continue using CMFboard until Quills is  stable and ready for Plone 2.5.

Other Options?

There are some other possibilities but I don’t think any of these are more advanced than the Quills project. (most of them do not even have a stable release available).  These are listed here:

http://plone.org/products/by-category/weblogs.

I do think that COREBlog looks promising (http://plone.org/products/coreblog2)

However it has so far been released only as a beta version.

Using non-Plone based blogging software????

Another possibility that we could consider would be too establish an LS blog using something like Wordpress and try to integrate it in some way with LS running on Plone.  I don’t have much idea about how we could do this. Arthur mentioned that by using LDAP (I don’t really know what this is) we could avoid the problem of members having to   log in twice (ie separately to our plone site and to our blog) .  I’m also not sure how the blog  would work with the LS domain name (etc). We wouldn’t want participants having to remember a quite different url etc..

(2) Issues to do with the site more generally

Currently the forum is the centerpiece of the site – in fact for most people it probably is the site.

However forum (and blog) discussions are by their nature ephemeral and once a topic disappears from view it also disappears for all but the most determined readers.

The material on the forum ought to be integrated with well organized resource material displayed on the rest of the site via a well designed folder structure.  Also our best forum material ought to be reworked into articles which are accessible in the folder structure (and linked back to the original forum debate). It would also be a good idea for us to develop a series of FAQs on particular issues.  An FAQ covering each of the major anti-war arguments (the ones that are recycled again and again!) would be very handy.

A  future blog  would probably  contain many pieces based on material available on our folders eg newspaper articles, book reviews et etc).  We could also begin doing this even while still using CMFboard. 

However in order to get started we need to fix our  current folder structure ( I think that I will have to write something separate about this)  and also make a start on getting our core group and new interested members to begin using their folders to submit material via their folders.  I am in the process of writing some end-user documentation for this purpose.

We also need to update the Welcome Page frequently.  It’s currently a dynamic page but we haven’t been making use of it in all the ways that we could.

There are a number of plone customizations which could make the whole site look much better. I think that this is important and is not just a matter of abstract aesthetics – people operate cognitively in a more efficient way if things are laid out in a way which is quickly taken in.  We don’t currently have anyone with the skills to do this sort of work and also we should put any complex customizations on-hold until we have migrated the site to Plone  2.1 (or preferably above). After the migration,  I think we could consider asking the 6feetup people for a quote on doing some of this work for us. They have some people on their team who do this type of work (web design) and have put together some very nice community and commercial sites.

I am currently having discussions with Calvin at 6feetup about migrating the site. The main issues we have to decide is what version of Plone to move to (considering the CMFboard problem as described above). 

 Spam

Another reason why migration is urgent is that we have 10-15  "fake members" joining the site each day. They use valid email addresses and some of them log-in and post spam.  I monitor all this and generally get rid of these "people" before they can cause trouble, but it is  waste of my time. And once I have deleted them they often come back and use the same email address to join again.   There are plone products which would reduce this problem substantially, but currently there is nothing suitable for Plone 2.05.

We also have people trying to join by using invalid email addresses. THis results in bounced emails which come to me (about 8 per day). This is more of a minor nuisance but could become more serious if tehre were enough of them to upset the mail server at sixfeet up (?).

There is a product available for Plone 2.05 which will work against one sort of spam (a process that involves using the member portrait to redirect people to other sites). This product  is not currently supported by the plone team, but I will write to 6feetup to see if they think we could install it without risk.

Our style of work …. (not strictly a technical issue)

We have to make much more effort not to appear like a club.  Currently the atmosphere of the site is such that I believe many people would feel that joining and playing an active part requires fairly close agreement with us about all aspects of our general “stance”.  We need to find a way around that.

For a start, I think that most statements of position should be signed by individuals rather than presented as “site policy”.  We should encourage membership from people who differ from us substantially on some issues and be prepared to publish interesting material from them.

I’ve recently asked someone who is in broad sympathy with us on almost everything (but isn’t a Maoist and believes that socialism would be worse than capitalism)  to write a critique of the site including suggestions about how we could make it  a part of a real united front.  If/when that becomes available we can discuss it.