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New Forums software

Since we need to setup some language subsites for CentOS based around forums, it was felt that we should also consider moving the forums presently hosted at http://www.centos.org/forums into the same system. So evaluating the options for the language subsites and finding a new forum system has been merged into one task.

1. Requirements from a new System:

A. Multiple persistent logins: so people can login from multiple machines with the same username/password at the same time ( or: someone can login from machine A, move to machine B login again and not have the login on machine A expire )

B. Must be able to scale ( couple of hundred thousand msgs )

C. Must be able to handle ldap auth ( if it cant, whats involved in writing the ldap-auth portion )

D. Must address the specific requirements raised by the present www.centos.org forum users:

1. Persistent logins - relates to (A) above
2. Remember read/unread posts across multiple PCs/logins per user, not per machine - relates to (A) above
3. View first unread post within thread feature
4. Ability for users to change/edit their registered email address
5. Better management of subscribed threads
6. Thank User button/feature (would be nice)
7. Quick links feature (would be nice) - A list of quick links to commonly performed tasks

E. Must support all languages we need ( pure utf8 support would be good )

F. Secure

G. Skin / Theme possibility

H. There must exist a workable path to port existing data from newbb over to new system

I. Friendly License

2. Nice to have

a. Gateway to Email

b. Capable of running multiple instances from a single deployment

c. Responsive community and developers

Candidates

Columns A to H and then a to c represent the points in requirements, mark 'Y' or 'N' in the columns as you test through.

Feel free to add more candidates to this list, if you think there is something suitable.

Working on options

Everyone is welcome to come and help with this trial process. Here is what we will make available:

1. A VM on our VM-Farm running CentOS5
2. Provision the VM, setup the basic things you need and help with infrastructure issues
3. Help with ldap, mysql and apache httpd. ( pgsql ? )

Here is what you need to do:

1. Select which software you would like to test
2. If someone else is already working with that software, thats fine - just get in touch with them and offer to help. If they like, they can then request a login for you.
3. If no one is working on that software, contact someone on the CentOS Team and have them nominate you for access ( and ask them to do this on the centos-devel list )
4. Once approved, make sure your name is mentioned along with the software in the table above.

LDAP

LDAP is running on 92.60.118.133 (port 389, STARTTLS works) and has a *very* basic setup at the moment.

There are two organizational units per organization in there (ou=Users,dc=centos,dc=org and ou=Groups,dc=centos,dc=org).

Each forum software is its own organization, so we actually have

dc=centos,dc=org
 o=smf,dc=centos,dc=org
  ou=Users,o=smf,dc=centos,dc=org
  ou=Groups,o=smf,dc=centos,dc=org
 o=phorum
  ou=Users,o=phorum,dc=centos,dc=org
 [...]

The username with which you can bind to the ldap instance is cn=ldapmanager,dc=centos,dc=org, you can get the password from range on irc (or via mail).

At the moment the ACLs look like this:

access to dn.base="" by * read
# access to dn.base="cn=Subschema" by * read
access to *
        by self write
        by users read
        by anonymous auth

which isn't pretty, but should be sufficient at the moment.

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