solar fire overview

[Eva Wissenz]

Hello!

Thanks for joining the group.

We hope you'll enjoy this overview and it will give many ideas and actions!!!

We would love to take a short break this week-end so maybe we can discuss on Monday (hopefully with Mumble)?

Thank you, Eva & Eerik

[Urs Riggenbach]

Thank you so much again you two for working on this. It is truly revolutionary work. 

Thanks again for posting OpenPower Nepal on SolarFire.org. 

As for the website, I am fluent in Drupal and Wordpress, and I have experience in doing geolocation-things, for example showing projects from all over the world on a map (check this project of mine for an example: http://www.connectuwc.org) I could definitely build this feature for you with Drupal. The most important thing is to keep the website uniform, so this might be the time to consider Drual as an open source CMS of choice. People could login, post locations to the map, collaborate in the wiki, and discuss things in a forum. You might hit some barriers trying to do all these dynamic things with SPIP.  The features in Drupal are all there. The connectUWC.org website I made has a lot of the features that you'd need. 

I can also help you guys with corporate social media integration, as I had to do so for OpenPower Nepal. I could create a SolarFire.org page on facebook, and redirect people to the main site. This is just a way to allow people to identify themselves with SF. 

Have a great weekend, 

Urs Riggenbach

OpenPower Nepal

http://www.mayauniverseacademy.org/open-power-nepal

[Eva Wissenz]

Thank you Urs for choosing Solar Fire for your project.
Yes SF is evolutionary but with only the 2 of us working on it I find this revolution pretty slow!
Thank you for proposing, Eerik will answer for Drupal.
We don't know where you are in Switzerland but it is not very far (map here). We have an old old car and a little little baby so that kind of trip isn't possible at the moment but if you have the opportunity, feel free to come of course.

I remember during the night that I forgot things such as:
Will is preparing a short film presenting the motivations of the investors.
When we can all talk to eachother next week, someone can write down the decisions, new actions, ideas, etc., and we can have a v02 doc.

We would like to make that discussion right now but we are too tired! Our daily Solar Fire life has changed a lot since the begining of this month. It's so great!

Bye guys and thanks again,
Eva

[Eerik Wissenz]

Hey URS,

Great to be of help on your project, I really think it can be pioneering.

Thanks a lot of offering to help on the IT front. Map integration is something I've never worked on. It would definitely be good to speak about the merits of Drupal compared to Spip. One major reason I use Spip is that it's very popular here in France (it's a French program) so I can easily get support here.

I've been running Spip for a few years now without any down time, DB problems, etc, for 12 sites. Also, the Spip team supports security updates through a single php file "security shield" you put up and blocks all known attacks to all version of Spip; clearly those weaknesses are then resolved in the next release, but you're not forced to upgrade the whole package to stay secure, just have to keep the security shield up to date. So I've been impressed by the stability, which is a major point.

For interactivity, Spip is built originally for a magazine setting, so is highly interactive; I just didn't implement automatic account creation on the current www.solarfire.org site (since I wasn't sure I could be full time to administer it).

So, I'm already building the new site with Spip, which you'll be able to get the direct user experience to compare with Drupal.

However, the Spip DB is very well organized and doesn't really change from version to version, so someone wrote a Spip to Drupal converter. So, changing to Drupal is not ruled out, and other tools could be developed and implemented on other platforms as well.

I haven't used Drupal more than just checking them out, so I will be very interested to see your feedback on how Spip compares, and the advantages/disadvantages of switching to Drupal (they're both open source :).

I've put up a mumble server, so we could chat on that channel as well; I'd be interested to hear your experience directly. (others could join too)

Best regards
Eerik

--
Eerik Wissenz

Free Access to Solar Energy
www.solarfire.org
SiSustainable - Web Development
www.sisustainable.com

[Ino Fleischmann]

Dear Urs / Erik

I am using Drupal for globalanchor.org as well. I would say it is probably the most flexible,
scalable and secure CMS at the moment. The user community is huge and support is
available worldwide. But I have to admit as well that it is very confusing in the beginning..

All the best!
Ino

[Urs Riggenbach]

Ino, you probably need a similar site for your open source micro hydro? I could definitely teach you how to make this feature for your site. 

No problem, I'm sure SPIP will work well. Looking forward to testing it out! 

How do I reach your mumble server?

Enjoy your weekend (Ignore our mails)!

Cheers,

Urs

[Eerik Wissenz]

Dear Urs and Ino,

For mumble, the server is 78.47.88.231 .

We could organize a tech meeting.

I'm starting the coding of the templates for the new site in Spip. I'm definitely interested in hearing what more Drupal may have to offer. I've looked into it a few times and have talked to some webmasters who know both Spip and Drupal, and the general view is that Drupal isn't as stable or easy to work with ... but that might be just because they haven't learned it enough ... it's always difficult to say.

Anyways, if you're interested in Spip, the best site to look at is http://programmer.spip.org/

Very quickly you get the idea of what you can do easily or not in Spip. Though of course, Spip is written in PHP and is designed to easily incorporate custom code if need be ... I've only needed to do that once though.

Hope to chat soon
Eerik