[Foresight-devel] Forums Update

[Paul Cutler]

I'd like to take gxti for working on trying to enable single sign on
for the forums and JIRA for the last month or two, but unfortunately
we weren't able to make it work.

We will need to roll out forums as a stand alone appliance, and we had
a brief discussion in IRC last night, but I wanted to make sure
everyone got a chance to weigh in, in case you weren't in IRC last
night.

We have two options:

1. We can go with SMF, similar to rPath's forums
(http://www.simplemachines.org/)
2. We can use the license provided from Jive Forums
(http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/forums/)

Both feature multiple language support, and the usual forum features.
We would need to create a Foresight branded theme for either.

Some pros and cons of each:

SMF:

Pros:

1. Easier to maintain as the SMF appliance is already built and
maintained by Stef
2. Open source project

Cons:

1. 1.x is the stable release, 2.0 is currently in beta testing.
(Announced almost a year ago without a release)
2. Some rough edges in how it displays some text, such as quotes

Jive:

Pros:

1. Enterprise class product, will scale effectively
2. Very polished project, in use by a number of Fortune 500 companies
3. Robust RSS suport
4. Tagging

Cons:

1. Closed source, but they provide a free license to F/OSS projects as
a way to give back.  (This one doesn't bother me as much as I thought
it would, especially considering Ubuntu uses vBulletin, another closed
source forum)
2. Would need to build an appliance

Talking to pscott last night, he felt that Jive was more polished
after testing both.  To quote him, "Jive is a product, not a project".

After thinking about this overnight, I'd like to recommend going with
Jive as we already have the license, though we'd need to build the
appliance.  Thinking long term, Jive will scale better as we grow (and
I see rapid growth for us in 2008!)  Additionally, and please don't
take this the wrong way, I almost think having a solution that is
different that rPath's might be good for Foresight to show some
independence as well.

Please let me know your feedback.  I'll be fine with either, but I
think Jive gets a slight edge.  I'd like to try and have a
recommendation by end of day tomorrow, and then discuss in the Focus
meeting Friday.  If you would rather keep your feedback private rather
than the list, just shoot me an email directly.

Thanks.

Paul

Paul Cutler
Foresight Linux