Every tool has its place
Some remarks from my understanding of what edgeryders.eu is and is not (both present and potentially):
- Of course there is lots of things to do, rework and redesign in this Drupal site. "My list is long", and as I said before, this is the messiest website I have ever cared for, which was so far simply due to a lack of volunteer resources to put into this compared to the resources needed by a website this big ... . But it's going to get better, and I will catch up with important things over the next month.
- When you do it right, it takes a lot of time. Ben mentioned SSL for example. I started to implement that over the last days, and it turns out this is how to do it right. Which took about 8 hours to research and write alone. SSL "as usual" with all the three-letter agencies listening in is frankly just snake oil, esp. given that we have a platform with public content and our users are technically inclined enough to not reuse a password from something important ... .
(And because “doing things right” takes so much time, it is better to use available tools that have been “done right” for their purpose, such as Trello, instead of using lots of dirty hacks to make edgeryders.eu do that all. The best we can realistically expect is edgeryders.eu to be the right tool for a limited, confined purpose in the future. What would that purpose be? That’s what I want to discuss next:)
- Edgeryders.eu is for inter-project collaboration. Let's keep expectations reasonable: edgeryders.eu cannot become a project management site that everyone will be happy with for managing their internal little tasks. Drupal is an old system with little support for AJAX for example, so it is hard to impossibe to hack it for making it speedy enough to manage lots of little tasks. Any specialized open source or commercial task management application is the better tool for this, and we're not going to invest hundreds of hours of programming to reinvent that for the Drupal context. Plus, task management requirements are very different between projects, as Ben outlined for unMonastery. In my view, I do not even want this to become a hosted task management platforml, or any other tool that is critical for a project's mission. The task this platform can fill well is inter-project collaboration: showing intermediate project results and getting feedback for them, and coming together to organize "joint venture projects" such as FormStorm, and to found new collaborations and find collaborators. (In my view, it's like the Github for non-source projects: projects on Github use that as their public collaboration interface, but almost always have additional internal tools for micro-management, such as mailinglists, own website with a wiki etc..)
- Edgeryders.eu is not for website hosting. This is a difficult decision, but I think it fits best into the software and content architecture to not offer website hosting features inside this Drupal website. Means, if Ben is looking to create a self-contained, independent-looking little public facing, static content website for unMonastery, a little WordPress install (on Edgeryders' server if he wants) is a way to go. Content on edgeryders.eu on the other hand will (1) always be accessible with the edgeryders.eu domain only, and (2) keep the same site-wide navigation structure and graphical design, to promote website coherence and provide intuitive navigation. This is how Github does it (in contrast to SourceForge, where you can have own websites on yoursubdomain.sourceforge.org). And Github does everything right :-) ... except the "teams" feature, that is. So you can host your project on edgeryders.eu without needing another web presence (as many do with their open little source projects on Github), but once a project grows so big that it needs more of an own identity or more specialized collaboration tools, it will need to use external web resources as well.
- How to support further development? Ben is welcome to help with Drupal development half a day a week of course. The overheads of context switching and learning how to contribute to a specific project are quite high for anyone not working on a project permanently. That's why we discussed that synergistic mutual support with network barter tech would be a solution. We will offer this solution to the community once it's released. (After some major UI rework, Economy App is now undergoing debugging and lots of little fixes, nearing its first public release ...).