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Nuxified.org officially relaunches using Drupal, a great and extensible piece of Free Software for web development. This is a brief description of ideas behind Nuxified.org and about it's new state.
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As part of the Libervis Network, Nuxified.org was founded to be a community powered Free Software support site that wouldn't come with some of the common lapses and annoyances that many other similar sites feature, such as most notably the excessive and contradictory advertising. The choice of any advertising that would be displayed on Nuxified.org is guided by the Libervis Advertising Policy which means that we wont display ads for proprietary software and other things that contradict what this site as a Free Software support community is about because we want to serve as an example of what we promote and support. In the same sense and for the same reason, this site wont run on proprietary software such as vBulletin or SMF, especially considering how good are the Free Software solutions for the same purpose. Nuxified community wont be disrespected in this way. This site wont be sold out because you can't sell or buy a community.
We want to build a friendly community without things like elitism and frequent "RTFM" answers and with respect towards all users. We also want it to be a great resource and the best experience for Free Software support which includes all Free Operating Systems such as GNU/Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris and others that you may find interesting, as well as all programs that run on these free systems.
We have started this site with phpbb, then moved to phpbb plus and while still experiencing certain limitations of the phpbb platform in regards to what we want to acomplish we have finally, and through an open process, decided to switch to Drupal (which has just recently had its new major 4.7 release) and merge with our sister site that was available at Nuxified.com to form the new Nuxified.org that you can see evolving now.
The reasons behind the switch are mainly the extensibility of the Drupal platform which translates to the ability to expand into any direction which we would choose with our users community at any time. While phpbb was mainly good for forums it was hard to reliably and cleanly extend it to fully support much more than that. With drupal extensibility is natural and nearly anything is possible. Drupal forums cleanly and fully integrate into the rest of the system, and vice versa. Drupal also makes us different from the rest of the usual Free Software and GNU/Linux support forums crowd, which mostly uses vBulletin or phpbb. This differentiation may prove to be a good thing, providing for a new and refreshing experience.
Some of the features that Nuxified.org offers at this point include:
- blogs (every user can blog) that allows you to express your opinions on certain technical Free Software issues or blog a comment on a news item coming from our "GNUs" aggregator (powered by LXer.com) with just a click of a "b" button in a "GNUs" block.
- Screenshots gallery that allows you to upload a screenshot of your desktop along with a description on what can be seen on it and how have you made it look the way it does, and have users rate and comment on it.
- Universal commenting system that is natural to Drupal and allows every item on the site, from articles to blogs to screenshots to be commented and discussed.
- A reddit style rating system allowing you to award a positive or a negative point to a post, article, comment, uploaded screenshot and any other type of content, and have the content with most positive points be propagated to the homepage.
- Ability to choose WYSIWYG editor for posting.
And of course, we have forums, the core of the whole Free Software support experience on Nuxified.org, where all the discussion and mutual help happens. The features above are however not necessarily everything that there is. This site will continue to evolve and all its users are allowed to participate in this evolution with suggestions, proposals and constructive criticism. You do have a say on what happens here and how things are done.
Ultimately we hope to succeed in building a friendly place where everyone from the Free Software community can come to learn, share their knowledge and help each other use Free Software with satisfaction. We invite you to consider joining us.
Thank you
Danijel Orsolic Full Story |
