Rolling out more changes on the web
During the incoming days we are going to introduce some more changes to our web. There will be no service interruptions while we modify our blog, to allow users post their own projects -via a moderator-, or when we introduce some small modifications to the Playground’s CSS. However, you should expect some small issues when we implement two main improvements that we are testing these days:
– a forum migration to a new system
– a unified user registration and login service over the whole site
These changes are part of our Fall’10 improvement plan, where we are trying to get an infrastructure that will allow us giving privileges to the users and become forum moderators, blog editors, etc. Also the unified login system should allow you purchasing goods on the forthcoming Arduino Store.
There still no sure date for these operations to happen, but it should be in the following 2 weeks, I like to roll out changes on Saturday night, when the US goes to bed and the EU isn’t awake yet. Anyway this time we might be forced to introduce the changes during weekdays … we’ll see how the schedule develops.
October 18th, 2010 at 00:46:13
New forum… moderators… unified logon…
Is this a dream?
October 18th, 2010 at 14:11:42
any news about the upcoming ethernet board?
October 18th, 2010 at 21:38:21
Sure,
that will come in a separate announcement. Massimo will make the official intro soon. Probably not this week though, since we are all busy with the website modifications.
Thanks for asking;
/d
October 19th, 2010 at 05:50:10
And which is the chosen system? Drupal, Joomla, e107?
October 19th, 2010 at 07:03:07
The discussion on this topic could go on forever but …
… we have decided that the documentation -at least until the end of the year- will remain in PmWiki, since we have crafted a system that makes automatic backups as well as generates the IDE’s reference straight from the website and, on top of it, caches everything as HTML so that we optimize the speed in serving the sites.
… when it comes to the forum we are 99% sure we will go for SMF, since seems to offer a lot of the requests we have from the community like easy administration, user profiles, kind of easy of styling, etc. Personally I think it will be a good tool e.g. to add comments at the bottom of pages and so on. I have been making some tests and with a little CSSing we can integrate forum threads at the bottom of pages … again a feature requested by the community. When this will be completely ready I am not sure of, since security is my main concern at this point. Integrating parts of sites within sites is a tricky thing.
… the key to all of this is a specially tailored identification system that will allow users to register and sign-in at a single point and with that they will be able of accessing everything. Just like Google does, you log into the email site, but you get access to the docs, calendar, etc.
So, sorry for the Drupal lovers, I also like it (even ran my own shop on Ubercart), but it’s dashboard is still not ready. Maybe in the next generation of Drupal (number 7) we can make a huge move into it. Joomla is still not of my liking. WordPress as a global CMS to the whole site is something we considered, because we really like the dashboard, but rendering the site from the database every time is not very efficient.
I could go on forever, I hope I managed to answer your question.