PostNuke

You can enter the contest here

The position of Assistant to the Operations Manager was created in response to our need for more developer and staff coordination for the purposes of retention and productivity, as well as to provide a direct point of contact for prospective developers. The Assistant to the Operations Manager position will assume the management of recruitment, staffing and training with a focus on acquiring and retaining quality developers and staff of all levels to support the development of the PostNuke Content Management System.

Mr. Robeson was selected as the premier candidate due to his proven dedication to the project and strong working knowledge of the PostNuke code base. His established rapport with developers and users alike, as well as his active presence on the PostNuke IRC network will continue to serve him well in this new capacity.

The duties related to this position will be simply relegated to the collection and disbursement of information relating to the staffing needs of individual projects such as core, block, theme, module and documentation development. Regular communication with the team leaders and members of various departments is required in order to have the ability to properly assess the needs of each department. The primary mission will be to communicate with the general public with the objective of recruitment and retention of volunteers in mind, and the suitable placement of those volunteers. Mr. Robeson will similarly be responsible for keeping an up-to-date staff roster and organizational chart, which will be updated and available to the general public on a regular basis.

Further duties will include the assisting the Operations and Support Managers design a web-based resource for the automation of these and other development processes.

Mr. Robeson can be reached at staff-relations@postnuke.com

Regards,

Steve MacGregor (grape)

The new versions cover a broader range of the PostNuke API, and have been updated to contain the latest thinking of the core development team.
Added or changed sections include:

• Hooks
  
• pnBlock* functions
  
• clarified many functions
  
• made examples more consistent
  

The pnAPI and pnMDG documents will ship with all future PostNuke releases.

Please update your links to point to the CVS download links above, which will always contain the most recent versions.

Work on an online version of these documents is underway. We expect to build a system similar to the php.net manual, complete with user comments.

Think about it; PostNuke supplies everything that an application developer would want even for creating a stand-alone application:

* a user system
* permissions system
* theme system
* security
* installation structure
* multi language support
* multi database support
* search API
* there's probably more that I'm not even thinking of right now.

And it really wouldn't take much more developer effort to do it. Essentially, the framework would be a stripped down version of PostNuke, containing none of what we previously thought of as modules (like downloads, news, links, etc.) but did contain the modules necessary to support the above 'framework' items. The installer wouldn't create all the extra SQL for the modules, and the included theme would be sparse (and fast) and would name the 'template' module as the start page.

It would give developers a head start in creating their new scripts, teach them sound programming practises by example, and the PostNuke community would end up with many more modules to choose from that would normally have to be converted first.

A Win-Win situation for everybody.

The questions I have are:
1) I love using PN and MySQL. Are there clients out there paying decent money to get PN sites built?
2) Can I make money on the integration/design part of the deal?
3) Are others successfully doing it?
4) Is there a job board for this type of work?

Any help would be appreciated. I am at a crossroad and need some help knowing which way to go.

Thanks.

msr

Firstly is the News/Articles section. I know that this is due for a major rework in the 0.8 release, however in the interests of ease of upgrading from 0.71 I wanted to know how the new system was going to be structured.

There appears to be little logical relationship between categories and topics at the moment, I am under the impression that categories are more generic in use that topics, but is this going to be the case under 0.8? Are categories going to become main categories, with topics as sub categories under them, i.e.

Category Topic

Dogs > Poodles
> Spanials

Cats > Black cats
> Big cats

The other main issue, is with multiple levels of access, and paid for access. So a site may have Unregistered, Registered and Gold members with users getting progressively greater access to content. Will the new articles system allow articles t be published not only under a category/sub-category, but also for a level of user?

Integrating a CC payment system into the user sign-up would also be interesting, although I don't want to go too far down this road with modifications to the core user module, without an idea of the best way of leaving access to upgrades. Has anyone else played with the idea of integrating online payment for levels of membership (this would be a CC payment gateway, rather than something like PayPal)

Anyway, I've probably rambled enough, anyone's ideas or experiences would be interesting.

Cheers
fasteddie

The AFCN is pleased to announce a cash award for the best open source package meeting the needs of community networks nationwide:

Requirements:

-- Apache 1.3.24 or later, PHP 4.1.2 or later, mySQL 3.23.51 or later , and FTP access. An
email-to forms handler is required to support Web forms.

• Email--SMTP server, POP3 services, IMAP support for Web email interface. Web email interface should
use PHP. LDAP service would be highly desirable.

• Mailing list -- Mailman.

• Discussion forum -- Phorum.

• Online calendar -- Ideally, this tool would use PHP and mySQL.

http://www.afcn.org/opensource/

The description is that you can specify sitewide setup on-the-fly to handle big communities or large web service.
An E-learning system in a university for example, you can add the realm College where you can specify specific modules to be turned ON/OFF, under that you can specify the realm for Department where you can specify the modules to be turned ON/OFF ... so on until you reach the realm Section of courses with their specific modules also.


Realm --> SubRealm --> Sub_of_SubRealm


On each realm, you can specify the specific modules to be turned ON/OFF with their corresponding permissions (Public, Private, Shared by specific Realm, etc.).

With this capability, you can easily setup an extensive online community. The multisites module is quite different because it focuses on the domain names. How about if you want to setup a large CMS, all of the sub categories existing in a single portal.

Please tell me if this is a concern of the Core development team else I'll be making my own module for this.

Been here since the 1st mutant. Cheers.

xorprime@yahoo.com
academicnuke.com

Our Visions of the Future

Modules/Blocks API - Continuing development of a function rich and robust Applications Programming Interface

Superb Documentation - Provide the best quality documentation anywhere. This includes developers documentation (<a href=http://www.mcdee.net/pn/pnMDG.pdf.gz target=_blank>Modules Developers Guide and <a href=http://www.mcdee.net/pn/pnAPI.pdf.gz target=_blank>API Guide), website admin documentation and end user module documentation.

Build a Development Community - We're stronger together that we are alone. We must centralize module development to aid reuse. Developers need to be taught the advantages of collaborative development and using the <a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/pn-modules target=_blank>Modules CVS structure (CVS, code review/help, bug trackers, feature enhancement requests, etc.). This will be required for official modules. This also reduces the risk of orphan modules in case the developer disappears.

Support - All Official Modules support forums will be located on the Postnuke site. A admin or user should be able to go to a single place for every module they're using.


The Current Status

We are currently going through major changes related to modules:

New Modules API - Postnuke now has a real API for blocks and modules. The new API is very powerful and comprehensive. Future releasess of PostNuke will no longer support the old phpNuke module architecture. This will require that all modules be rewritten to work with the new API.

Modules move out of Core - Modules have been moved out of the Postnuke core CVS and into the <a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/pn-modules target=_blank>Modules CVS. The separation of core and modules will allow a website admin to tailor their installation by installing the basic Postnuke core and then adding modules whenever they desire. The separation will also allow more frequent module releases.

Modules CVS - The <a href=http://sourceforge.net/projects/pn-modules target=_blank>Modules CVS is currently hosted on Sourceforge. The state of the current CVS is poor. Many modules have not been converted to the new API, do not have a owner, the Sourceforge CVS does not offer granular (by module) security, or project staffing shortages exist. The Project Management Team (PMT) is working to resolve these issues and more announcements will be posted shortly.

Module Classification System - As all modules have to be rewritten to the new API, we're taking the opportunity to look at the Official, Beta and Nonstandard classification system for modules. A new review system is being developed to evaluate modules to determine if they should garner official status. This review will include Security, Documentation, Installation, Support Structure, Quality and Standards Compliance. A website admin should be confident that they're getting the best available when they install an Official Module. In the interim, all modules are being decertified and stripped of their Official Status.

Module Validation Site - A new module validation site has been implemented and the module support forums have been moved to the main Postnuke site. Check out the new site at <a href=http://www.testnuke.com target=_blank>www.testnuke.com.

Module Registration/Search System - We've started development of a system to register modules and collect various information about them. In the future, this will be the place to search for a particular widget module for Postnuke version X.XX

Staffing - And finally we come to staffing. There are a number of opening in the Project and we need people to successfully accomplish our goals. We'll post more at a later time on open positions in the project. Most of all we need developers for converting modules to the new API structure. Please come and adopt a module.