The NGDN meeting went well on Sunday and we covered a lot of business related topics about the structure and depth of our agreement. This gives us an idea of where we all stand on issues related to the business. Andrew will take this to his uncle and then we will come back with a more structured business agreement.

I have also been developing some automated systems at work to deal with Auditing Security on the Novell volumes, as well as polling Novell TED distributions on servers.  This has made work a whole lot more interesting.

Cheers, Chris.

Virtualization provides some interesting benefits and disadvantages that I had not at first examined. I also was not aware of the many different levels of Virtualization available, from Operating Systems to Virtual Storage solutions. This has been an eye opener.

On NGDN, we have delayed some business meetings for a few weeks, but have made some progress on design elements and launch direction.  Once this business meeting has been conducted we can formalise the business in writing. When we have a formal agreement on how to structure the business we will be in a position to work on development with some confidence that the Site will not crumble due to creative difference or idea theft. So a few more weeks before we get a Lawyers eye view of the business relationship.

Cheers, Chris.

At this point we are beginning to prototype different UI Layouts, building a feature list, and structuring development of core features. The obvious first feature is the User Profile Manager, which is core to the entire site. I shouldn’t need to go into any real detail with this as everybody should be used to interacting with User Profile Manager (or a User Login Manager). The other major feature that the site will rely heavily upon is Team Management. This site is about teams working and communicating together, and as such this becomes the bigest feature to add to the site.

There is at least one technology that is not going to be abandoned, simply because it is a core piece of software for the growth and use of the site. This I will leave to divulge more about later. The other interesting Technical note though is that we are seriously looking at developing in Ruby, so this will be a steep learning curve for me as I have had the barest glimpses of Ruby in the past.

Additionally we are looking at some of the other people who may be interested in joining the project who were present during the initial discussions. This project requires active support, which may be an issue due to time restrictions placed on some people, myself included.

I will now try and spend some time designing User Management and Team Management, as these seem to be the major foundations of the entire content of the site. In the meantime we will also be working on the Prototypes some more to determine the orientation of the content on the site. I will be focusing some time on learning Ruby as well during this period, which should be quite difficult given my current study schedule.

Cheers, Chris.

Cheers, Chris

I am currently in the process of installing software to this domain in order to continue testing and building. I will also need to provide access for Andrew and Thomas to the Domain, which will mean I have to look into the ssh and ftp setups so as to avoid allowing access to existing domains.

I am currently playing with some themes that are potential bases of building the site. As yet I have only modified some small aspects of the software setup. I have just found out how to complete the PHP setup for this domain through the Dreamhost Knowledgebase. I will have to wait until I am at home to complete this due to ssh and ftp access being unavailable from work.

I will keep you all posted as to the progress of development as it happens, and you will find out the Domain Names in good time.

Cheers, Chris.

Conetent Management Systems that we have looked at or are currently looking at include Joomla!, Typo, and Drupal. The main functionality we will require with this Content Management System is integration with some Forum Software (none of which yet seems to integrate seemlessly enough for our needs), Some kind of Wiki, and Subversion.

Currently it looks like we will need to work on integrating current technologies together, and tying their databases into one. This makes the project a whole lot more complex than it should need to be. This is one reason we are currently looking at moving away from PHP solutions and moving towards RoR solutions. Once each of the packages have been tested with some Forum and Wiki packages, it will be a matter of determining the most useful combination of software/platforms/databases. There is still a lot of time to be put into testing at this stage.

Cheers, Chris.