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Dojo Community Resources

What I am hoping to achieve by writing this article, is to receive community feedback regarding the construction of this community resource. Now that I have said all that, here are the things I hope to see achieved by the creation of this community resource.
  1. Community written module/widget hosting that is outside of the scope of the Dojo Contributor License Agreement
  2. Support forum for posted modules/widgets
  3. Community written FAQ/How-to articles
  4. Community driven content (Relating to but not necessarily limited to technoligies where Dojo can be used)
  5. Community written JS Library/Toolkit/Framework etc. comparisons
  6. Dojo anything! Links to articles, personal blogs, write ups, news articles websites that showcase Dojo, companies that use Dojo.... Literally ANYTHING! (anything legal anyways ;))
Note: This is not a replacement to the http://dojotoolkit.org website but rather a collaborative site that allows for unofficial modules and widgets to be collectively offered to the Dojo Community. Code contributions to this site would not require Contributor License Agreements, the poster will maintain liability for content provided by him/herself in this case. Just because this site won't require a CLA, this should not be seen as an easy way out to contributing to the Dojo Community, contribution of good ideas and useful code is still encouraged to be made directly to the Dojo Toolkit project. As everyone knows, the Dojo community has been expanding at an enormous rate since the release of Dojo 0.3.0, and with it that growth has come the question; "Where can we find Dojo resources on the web, that aren't direct products of The Dojo Foundation?". This of course has been addressed in the past, but in a passive manner, nobody has yet taken an active role in solving this problem. Consider this article step #2 in the process of solving this problem. Step #1 was of course my brainstorming and researching possible ways of approaching this. As of this past weeks IRC meeting in #Dojo-meeting, it has been decided to work towards integrating a Forum system into the current list of Dojo resources and the need for a "Dojo Resources" type community was also addressed. At this time, I believe that the "Dojo Community Resources" site could very well be hosted off the normal domain, in fact I would encourage it to be on its own namespace (to steal a term from Dojo/Javascript). By moving this project to a seperate domain, it will I believe, remove liability from the Dojo Foundation, for submissions that may have been made without prior authors consent. My idea on this is that the submitter would maintain liability for their submissions, if this is at all possible. Of course I am not a lawyer, so this is just my idea how I would like to see things work. Why I am writing this article? Well, I believe that this is to be a resource for the Dojo Community, that it is only right that you the community, should have some idea of what is being considered for your benefits. As it stands, I have volunteered web space from my personal account, as well as to purchase the domain name (yet to be determined). As for the resources available to make this happen, I have been considering using a PHP framework/CMS to meet the "community" aspect of the site, and preferably one that has a forum project integrated into it. It has been suggested that the scope of this search should be extended beyond just PHP software, so I'll be entertaining a few suggestions on that as well, however my strengths lie in PHP and JavaScript so I'll admit that I am biased towards that as a solution. What projects have I looked at? Well in my years of playing "Web developer" I have experimented with several of the CMSs out there. Among them I have used: Joomla, Mambo, phpCake, MKP, and most recently Seagull. Of all these, there are various forums associated with them or that have been integrated by third parties, however only one of the forums really supports the features that we were looking for to integrate into the current Dojo resources; FUDforums which is integrated into the Seagull Framework. So that is what I am hoping gets adopted by as the forum of choice for Dojo; not only because it supports all the features we want, but it is also supported by the PHP framework that I am wanting to use for the community site. Basically what I am aiming for is a site where the community contributes most of the content. I am hoping for a small amount of help from at least 1 other Dojo contributor in order to be mediators between the Community and the Dojo contributors. I would also hope for several trust worthy and knowledgeable community members to help maintain the community forums and such as well. These people would be working on site layout etc, forum moderation, and if capable, feature modification/creation to meet the needs of the community site. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding what would aide in creating the best "Community Resource" website out there, by all means post a comment below with your ideas and recommendations. As I am wholly expecting the Dojo Community to play a major role in how this project starts, evolves, and runs. To make that possible, I'm counting on loads of feedback and cooperation from you, our Community.

You mention Cake so i guess

You mention Cake so i guess you have already seen the Bakery: http://bakery.cakephp.org/ , something similar combined with a source repository for widgets might indeed make a great addition to the project. i don't think the fact that you host something automatically makes you responsible for the content b.t.w. in the states and a lot of other countries you will have to take something down if you get a takedown notice but as long as nobody start knocking there is no problem. a different domain will not help here. a server in a different jurisdiction might, but i don't think you are planning on hosting truly questionable content.

It will be hosted seperately

It will be hosted seperately from dojotoolkit.org's server, my comment regarding liability is mostly in regard to the fact that Dojo requires CLAs for contribution to remove liability from the Dojo Foundation, and this site will have no such thing. And yes, I am aware of takedown notices and the likes, I'm just spelling everything out for thost that aren't aware of all these things. An attempt to remove any bad pre/misconceptions from this whole process if you will. In regards to the Bakery, no, it did not exist in when I last used Cake (several years ago). I'll take a look at it though. As far as I'm concerned, attachments inside of a sticky post works great for each "products" release notification. (What can I say... I'm a simple person ;))

Well, what can I say, at

Well, what can I say, at last! I think this will help to further this neat API called dojo forward. Especially considering the way you have planned, where you keep the dojo api development totally separated from the community. Even though I have kept a close look at Seagull since I found it first time for a while ago I have not been able to test it yet, but I am sure you will succeed with that one. My experience lies very much in Joomla, and reading top down I was thinking yes yes yes Joomla would be perfect, until I read Seagull and further down FUDForum. I don't mean to turn this to a discussion of what is the best forum or not rather just out of curiosity, what is the special feature that FUDForum had which made it rather interesting? Cheers for the new Dojo Community!!!

FUDForum comes stock with

FUDForum comes stock with the ability to integerate with Mailing Lists so that we can provide both Forum/Mailing List and IRC support. Thats the big feature that is offers, plus NNTP and RSS built in as well, focuses on Security and efficiency. These are all key things that we are looking for. Personally, I was never very impressed with Joomla or Mambo once I started using them.... they each had their quirks and were easy to break :(

When I hear "community" and

When I hear "community" and PHP in one sentence, I think Drupal. Take a look at what they've done with drupal.org, how the modules have their own forums, the general forums, snippets, themes - all would be awesome for the Dojo community. In fact I think there's some drupal folks using dojo already if memory serves.

Sam, I've been thinking

Sam, I've been thinking about that too, and you are right, as in the year+ I have been hanging around the Dojo scene, I have helped a couple people that are from Drupal. It my also solve some other issues we're looking at trying to do in the near future ;) (non Community related but Dojo related).