Hi !
Here's a message just to let you know that the web platform of the
french-speaking community has successfully been migrated from drupal to
a band new wiki-based modular architecture.
check it out ! --> http://www.postgresql.fr
Our website is now an happy bazaar composed of a blog (dotclear), a
forum ( fluxbb, the software formerly known as punbb) , the french
documentation ( static HTML ), a projet repository ( trac/svn), an rss
aggregator (planet), and of course a wiki (dokuwiki)
So, why did we drop out drupal ?
Well it's a long story but basically drupal was just perfect during the
first 3 years, but as the website became more popular, drupal did grow
into a bloated sleeping monster. The maintenance was a nightmare, major
updates were merly impossible. In the end we had to throw in the towel
and admit that trying to make that monster evolve would take more time
than restarting from scratch...
Note that i'm not saying that drupal is bad thing in itself or that
drupal+postgresql isn't a nice couple. Most of our problems were due to
lack of time and energy rather than technical issues...
By the way, we decided to try another philosophy, based on a modular
approach, as opposed to the "all-in-one" approach of drupal.
Furthermore we had a good feeling with dokuwiki, especially with the
french pgday website (http://www.pgday.fr)
Basically, it took us something like 6 months to migrate everything,
unifying 6 different webapps under the same CSS stylesheet. Some data
and user accounts have been lost along the way, but globally we managed
make a smooth transition.
For those who are curious, here are the snapshots of the previous versions :
* Version 1 : static html (2004) --> http://archives.postgresql.fr/v1/ * Version 2 : drupal (2005-2008) -->
http://archives.postgresql.fr/v2/
yes we've come a long way :-)
Today the french-speaking community web platform is based on :
* 2 debian servers * 3 DNS domains DNS, une dozen of sub-domaine * 20 000 single visitors per month * 3624
registeredusers * 10 web applications * 6 mailing lists * 7 PostgreSQL bases ;-) * a few benevolent
administrators
If you have any comments, ideas or critics about our new platform,
please send it to contact@postgresql.fr
Regards,
Damien