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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

I do agree that we should limit the fractured nature of things as they have been. The LS 'scene' is so small now that it simply can't support having content spread all over the internet. Combining efforts into one location, or as few locations as possible, will help a little I think.

Sorry Jugg.. I've been so busy the last few weeks. I admit that I didn't even get a chance to read your entire email, so I hadn't responded.

You're right that we already have a lot of the content that needs to exist... it's just too spread out. There are so few new users coming to LS now.. we need to do whatever we can to make the small amount of information available easy to find for them.

As for the content request that was put out.. I guess I hadn't made it clear to the-golem that I was intending to write and combine a lot of the content for the site myself. Preferably I was going to get as much content onto the site as possible, and then others could feel free to edit or add as they see fit afterward. So, don't take the request for content negatively.. I think we're ok there, right now.

Reinventing the wheel is another thing that has produced a lot of nothing in the LiteStep community.

completely agree here. You and I have both seen past failures, and would rather not see them repeated. My thought was never to restart anything from scratch.. other than maybe the web site design that the-golem has been working on and other basic things like this forum. My idea was to combine as much of the existing community knowledge and existing content into one spot where users new and old can find it. Hopefully then this will help to spur new activity, even if it's at a very small level. I don't know what the future of LS is... it might be to die off sooner than later. But I really don't want to see it die off prematurely and due to unnecessary fracturing or stagnation (like having ls-themes, lsml, and other resources all disappearing as they did). So, all I want to do is try and counteract that.

I'm not sure what to do about the modules yet. It's definitely a requirement that a better site than modules.shellfront.org or ls.greywool.com exists, so we'll certainly need to create a new site for the modules. I think that we should make it a goal to sort through the modules and pull the ones out that we know don't work in XP or later, or the current LS. The module list is full of old modules that are unusable now, and this helps no one (they can always be placed into an 'archive' so they're still accessible). If anyone has suggestions for a system we can use where the module zips can be uploaded, managed, browsed, meta data like description, version, and release dates can be entered, etc... let us know.

Right now, we need to get the-golem's site moved to ls.info... or whatever .tld is being used. My preference is that we come up with a way for all of the sites (.com/.net/.info) to show the same web site.. using whatever method works for us, but obviously this relies on Jugg agreeing. Once the site is moved, we can start adding content. Light-weight/simple CMS options are being looked at, so we can easily add and edit content , but we may just use static files. It's not as if we're building a huge site here.

using LS since 1998. Old FPN site operator, owner of ShellFront, keeper of other LS domains
State of the Step 2011

27

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Sounds good. I don't know enough about webpages or even coding to help in anyway that i can think off but I want litestep to thrive again. I miss the freedom

28 (edited by brembs 2011-10-23 13:41:46 pm)

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

"If anyone has suggestions for a system we can use where the module zips can be uploaded, managed, browsed, meta data like description, version, and release dates can be entered, etc... let us know."

I'm still using e107 as CMS and that has a download section by default. works good enough for the e107 plug-ins and should work well enough for modules, methinks. I'm sure there are download plug-ins for whatever CMS out there. Given the number of modules the current user base most likely is being able to certify as 'working', my guess is that something like that should be sufficient for quite some time, shouldn't it?

LiteStep addict since b23. http://brembs.net

29

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Using a CMS for this is not something I would have thought of myself. Nice idea Brembs!

I know the-golem has looked in to using Wolf CMS. So I tried to find a downloads plugin for it. This is what I found: https://github.com/realslacker/Downloads-Plugin

If we can make it so that users can upload their own modules we might be on to something here smile

30 (edited by brembs 2011-10-24 12:38:26 pm)

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

You can see the downloads section of e107 on my site, I use it for my publications:
http://bjoern.brembs.net/download.php
You can define categories and have various options in terms of sorting and stuff.

Just as a template for what this one day might look like.

LiteStep addict since b23. http://brembs.net

31 (edited by bloczone 2011-10-24 20:30:50 pm)

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

One idea could be to use a forum as a base - and then add downloads and other sections, re-using the login. Its always a hassle to maintain multiple logins or use bridges which may or may not exist anymore. I have used SMF as a forum for years, and built downloads, blog(ish) and gallery sections around it, in PHP. My website reflects that.

That is, if you want rapid setups. Otherwise there are a good number of good liteweight CMS's out there. e107 I haven't used since 2005-2006 lol, so no comment on that - but as I remember it was quite nice then.

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

the-golem has basically worked out a way to maintain a single login across the web site, so I'm not very keen on using the forum for anything other than what a forum should be used for big_smile

using LS since 1998. Old FPN site operator, owner of ShellFront, keeper of other LS domains
State of the Step 2011

33

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Thats a matter of opinion - but, it was only a suggestion. Its your project lol.

34

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

I second the notion that a common login for 'all matters LiteStep' would be desirable and should be feasible, one way or another.

LiteStep addict since b23. http://brembs.net

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

bloczone wrote:

Thats a matter of opinion - but, it was only a suggestion. Its your project lol.

What rootrider didn't say: The CMS I'm playing around with has a few "downloads" plugins that I'm looking into. If I can get that to work, then there'd be no need to have the forum handle it.

36

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

You mean "As Tobbe already said earlier in this thread" tongue

37

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

So I finally got in touch with jugg last night after a good 3 months of searching, haven't talked to him in ages, and he has passed along the need for a modules site to be built.  I really don't want to reinvent the wheel too much as I go...but what sort of generalized requirements do you guys have for a modules site? 

I've got some pieces that were in progress back in the day for LSnet that I'm hoping to build upon.  Already in my list of things to add are standardized documentation formats for all modules, read XML, and the ability to import an existing archive of "Old" modules.  Long term I was hoping to build some sort of Source Repository as well with the ability to have multiple users submit updates to a code branch.

Long haul I totally support the one user one login principle over all of the sites so whomever can help me implement that would be great.

Thanks

-dev

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

DeViLbOi: Nice to have you around! It would be great if we could have some kind of modules site. Did you ever see the modules part of ls-themes.org that TCH4k built? It worked really well!

What would the benefits be of writing module docs in XML?

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

I did not ever visit ls-themes.org honestly.  sad  My original thought process around design was more back to what modules.litestep.net was originally.  Boring interface...tons of functionality.

So to me...the benefits of going to XML would be the standardized interface for applications to be created around rendering and creating the documents.  Don't focus so much on making them pretty, let others handle that, but provide a pretty standard way of creating them for everyone.  For the LSDocs I had basically done something similar with my own tagging system for doc creation but then it's all proprietary and junk.  Long run I'd like to enhance the NLM Interface to provide a view of currently loaded modules along with a link to documentation.  Also I'm going to have one of the guys design a desktop application for drag and drop document creation to take the burden of knowing what goes where out of the hands of the developer so they can focus more on module creation rather than the docs.  Once that's done I'll have them work on getting the module upload completed in the same app so that we can deploy to multiple repositories as needed by the community.

40

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

What he did was just look through the module's zip file looking for any kind of readme file, then he transformed it to something suitable for presenting online, and added that to the info page for the module. That way we got online module docs for almost every module, without having to update any modules or their docs. It worked great!

I'm not a big fan of XML. It's too noisy! You almost have to render it somehow to make it readable. I much prefer something like markdown for readme files/documentation. But that obviosly doesn't give you the metadata you get by using xml... But a clever parser and a markdown template module authors should use could probably accomplish what you need.

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

XML is horrible to look at raw...but it provides a lot of flexability to us as well.  Things like being able to have one XML document with all of the settings for all versions seems like a nice feature.  Since I have a desktop programmer working with me I can make a desktop app do anything I need...like...oh...I dunno...importing all of the available settings and commands from module SRC so all you have to do is define them.  Going through the backlog of modules also shouldn't be overly complicated as you really don't need to document all 500 versions of LSXCommand, just the last..oh...10...should cover most everyone.  Then again...we could work it the other way and just put all of the commands into a database and then let users output everything via query and report.

42

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

reStructuredText or Markdown text documents  (I prefer reStructuredText) is the way to go in my opinion.  Easier for developers to maintain, and easy to generate pretty output on a website.

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Any chance of getting the news page here updated to pull from lsp.litestep.info RSS feed for the time being?

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Also, what is currently at http://litestep.info/overview/litestep- … notes.html  - that is actually the LiteStep manual.  Could the main docs link be updated to point to the same content until something useful is in the wiki?

45

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

jugg: Good sugestions! Talking to rootrider on irc, or emailing him are probably the only two ways of getting those things fixed.

46

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

OK...so am I safe in working on the assumption that nobody has any requirements that I may not have thought of based on 5 year old knowledge?

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Yeah, I think so smile

Do you remember the old ls documentation project where we went through old module readmes trying to convert them to some common format? I was part of that. That was back when LS was still very popular, and had a much larger user base than it does now. And even then we couldn't finish it. So don't expect anyone to format/convert any old readme files!

So anything you build has to work with readmes the way they are right now.

48

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

No problems there...I'll have a system for antiquated documentation along with the new stuff on the site.  I'll even try and make it easy for devs to use with hopefully an import of available commands from the source.  We'll see what happens though...I need to start somewhere.

49

Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

You know how it goes, anything it better than nothing!

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Re: LiteStep Unified: The Community Website

Regarding Module organization,

What about using Github or Amazon S3 and cataloguing each module using a MySQL database?

The database could take an incredible amount of time to create from scratch. Copy-paste might speed things up.