Hi Jesse,
Congratulations on the great-looking website and the interesting business ideas (the user-powered stuff). I have never tried any of your software but I was led here by comments that you were a developer with an "excellent attitude" and I wanted to see what it was all about.
I was impressed by the look of the site and the unification across all areas of it (the forums, the issue tracking, the pages, the comments system etc) and wanted to ask you if you'd developed the software that powers the backend. In doing so I had to sign up for an account, and in my confirmation email I see that you're using Drupal.
So I guess there's no need to ask what software you're using now... but I'm still curious to know, how much work was required to achieve this level of customization, and are you using any custom code?
I am currently using a mis-mash of lots of different pieces of software on my own site (Bugzilla for bug tracking, MediaWiki for wiki section, Movable Type for weblog sections, UBB.Threads for forums, hand-edited HTML and PHP done in BBEdit etc) and for some time now I've been thinking how nice it would be to have all of these pieces integrated into a single solution (would be even better if I could somehow single-source the documentation for my software so that the online version and the version shipped with the apps were the same). I didn't want to re-invent the wheel and have to code it all from scratch, but neither did any existing solution really appeal to me. So I would be interested to hear any comments you might have about your experience.
Cheers,
Wincent
Wincent, I remember visiting
Wincent,
I remember visiting your site hourly in the pre max os x days trying to get news on what was to be OS X. Thanks for keeping us all updated :)
So yes drupal is doing all the hard work on this site. I highly recommend it, with the caveat that I've never actually used another CMS, and I've never done any web programming except for this site. So I'm not all that knowledgeable on the subject.
Here are the main modules that I'm using and some notes.
blog - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/blog/
For now this is more of an official news stream then a blog. For each blog entry i choose promote to front page, that way the blog entries are placed in the sitewide RSS feed. But on the front page I've themed out the normal list of front page items that you'll see on most drupal sites.
book - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/blog/
This is the module that I use for the different user guides. I think you are supposed to be able to get this module to export book content in docBook format which can then go to pdf, html... But so far I haven't bothered with that and my applications help menu just takes them to the website. For me that's a much easier way to do things.
contribution - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/contributions
This is a custom module that I wrote so people can post scripts and plugins. I can send it to you if that feature is of interest.
forum - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/forum
This is just the standard drupal forums module.
project - http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/project
This is the issue tracking module. In many ways it works great, but it's also a bit funky in places. If you are starting from scratch I would first see if you can get the new case tracker http://drupal.org/project/casetracker module to do the job instead.
ecommence - I'm using drupals ecommerce module for the shopping card and store stuff.
I think those are the major modules that I'm using. I also have a custom phpTemplate theme.
In general the experience has been good, and I am quite happy with the result. It has taken quite a bit of time to get working, but a lot of this is probably due to the fact that I didn't (still mostly don't) know PHP or anything about web programming.
Jesse