Gnomepal
We're building an install profile of Drupal that makes deploying a community site easy. Drupal is an empty shell - a great framework for building a Web site upon, but it's incomplete all by itself. Almost every Drupal deployment uses a laundry list of third-party modules, themes, and custom code to make the resulting site feature-rich. Using modules and themes that are already available can help us get really close to a community server. We're doing the work to find the gaps and build things to fill them... to develop best practices... to create lists of recommended modules and themes... to write modules or even bridges between modules. All of this will result in an "install profile" someone can use to get a community site right from the start - whether they download and set it up themselves, or go through a recommended Web host for complete ease.
Wherever you can help, we need you - the community needs you, and your next Web community needs this. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we're just assembling those parts (with you) to make a more complete community experience for sites the world over. We believe the person (user, member) is at the center of the community experience, and tools for that person and his/her groups are meant to enable them (not restrict them). We are developing toward integration with OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID - and have at heart the Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web.
We wish to create an integrated set of tools to further empower a community's members - to help them extend a single-tool site (a blog, a forum, a wiki) into a richer destination without the need to remember yet another Web address. We wish to help them discover other relevant communities throughout the Web, no matter the platform.
Dogfooding will happen live at Gnomepal.org
Involvement Information:
- Chat: #drupal-gnomepal on irc.freenode.net
- Offer to help assist the organization, communication, documentation
- Contribute or build your own modules to integrate
- Spread the word to other Drupal developers and designers
- Partner, donate, or offer angel funds to support development costs
- Code sprints for this particular project will be happening at least monthly in the Seattle area
Sites / Drupal Developers pledging their own code:
Meeting Notes
Things to Consider (Official Feedback Form is Coming Soon)
- What do you want in a community site?
- What are your top 5 most important components / tools / features of a community site?
- What pieces "must" be in place for Gnomepal's first milestone in order for you to start using it to build a community?
- Are there any parts that, if they weren't available, would keep you from using Gnomepal for your community needs?
- What frustrates you about your current community site(s)?
- What do you love about your current community site(s)?
- What tool(s) do you currently use to organize your community?
- Is limited customization (color, logos, etc.) important to you?
- Do you want to be able to narrow your feature set down to only a few, or to have the whole range of features always available?
- How long would you be willing to spend updating your site (its content) each week?
- Is it important that you be able to generate revenue with your site?
- Is sharing revenue with your community members important?
- Do your members pay dues or make donations to the community?
- How active is your community? In what way?
- How likely are you to set up a new community site within the next month? Six months? Year?
- If you build a new community site on Gnomepal, would you allow all of your members to contribute promoted content, only a few members, or only yourself?
- Would your site be private, or open to the general public?
- Do you anticipate your community would need live (video or audio) content, or possibly event coordination tools?
- Would you host the community site software on your own server, or would you prefer a tiered hosted solution?
- How important is it to you that you be able to view detailed stats about your community site? (very, somewhat, not at all)