It's nice to be able to announce, that following our numerous problems with GForge at the NOC over the last year the replacement solution that we promised is ready to go. Chris Hildebrandt, known as slam on the forums has been hard at work for a number of months producing a trac installation on which third party developers can host their PostNuke projects.Some of you may not be familiar with Trac. Taken straight from the Trac website - "Trac is an enhanced Wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects... It provides an interface to Subversion, an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities."
From our perspective, Trac provides a lightweight and clean solution to the problems we are experiencing with the monolithic NOC, which is very hard to maintain. We're hoping you'll find the trac installation easy to use and navigate, and an improved NOC in all respects.
From the perspective of third party developers, trac provides a useful administration interface from which you can administrate all aspects of your project, from it's description to SVN commits list and file downloads. Trac also has much better milestone and target tracking for bugs and releases.
As a user, you can search the available projects, and use the clean navigation to find your way around. There's also an online SVN browser where you'll be able to look at a project's source code.
Chris is looking to begin converting projects over from the NOC as soon as possible. On request, he can import tracker and SVN history, or alternatively you can start afresh. He'd like to talk to people as he makes the conversion so that if anyone's missing something useful, or has suggestions he can improve the Trac installation for everyone.
Looking to the future, we'll convert the core PostNuke project over to Trac. We'll also try to get single sign on between community.postnuke.com and Trac working if possible.
If you are a third party developer, be aware that we are planning to close the NOC in the future. If you have active projects you should have them converted to Trac as soon as possible. All NOC content will be archived, however due to the ongoing spam issues we will eventually remove the NOC from public access.
See trac.postnuke.com in action!
Posted by
Simon
on Saturday, May 03, 2008
Comments (14) · 852 Reads
|
14 Comments so far
(Latest comments
)
1. Topiatic wrote on May 03, 2008 at 11:26 PM
Oh happy days... Thanks Slam for your hard work... here and elsewhere.
2. Jusuff wrote on May 04, 2008 at 12:50 AM
How the migration process will be carry out? Should we (as third party devs) contact with slam?
3. Arthens wrote on May 04, 2008 at 01:23 PM
Nice work4. Simon wrote on May 04, 2008 at 03:40 PM
Sorry, I should have mentioned - please get in contact with Chris. I'm sure he'll answer private messages, or alternatively he is in the PostNuke Skype chat most days.5. slam wrote on May 04, 2008 at 05:08 PM
Feel free to approach me via:a) IRC at irc.oftc.net, channel #PN (preferred)
b) Skype German or English PN chat (I do not like Skype, though)
c) private message at the German or English PN support sites (ok, but slow).
Please be aware that moving from Gforge to Trac is a great opportunity to not just clean out old cruft from your projects (and cleaning out inactive users & projects), but also finding a better new name for your modules. You might be aware that for example the PN$mymodule pattern is depreciated, as PostNuke will change it's name.
Take your time to plan with me what and when to migrate, and to learn how Trac can help you to manage your projects much better than the old sloggy Gforge at NOC. Trac is also your friend when it comes to integrate special features exclusively for your project.
Thanks to Drak for providing the new additional server for Trac, and thanks to Steffen who is striving hard to adapt the optics of Trac for us. Please understand that the start page and it'S features are still under development.
Greetings,
Chris
6. nestormateo wrote on May 04, 2008 at 05:36 PM
Thanks a lot Chris!
7. dits wrote on May 04, 2008 at 07:00 PM
Sound great!But I have a problem trying out: just registered (username dits). And can't log in. Takes me to the registration screen. When I try to re-register It says account already exists
8. Dixso wrote on May 05, 2008 at 09:47 AM
Yes, very good job.9. Topiatic wrote on May 06, 2008 at 01:39 AM
Question... is it just the project/download pages that get transferred or does the SVN/CVS also need to be exported to a new server?
If the SVN/CVS server remains the same I'll just start afresh.
10. hilope wrote on May 06, 2008 at 10:58 PM
@Topiatic:Everything is moving. My scribite! project has already moved. SVN and Wiki are nearly completed. At least the download page for packages has to be created. Take a look at http://trac.postnuke.com/projects/scribite/
Talk with Chris if you want your old project imported (including SVN) or if you like to start completely new.
11. Simon wrote on May 07, 2008 at 01:01 PM
It's an entirely different server to avoid the NOC killing our wonderful clean Trac installation, so everything will need to move.12. JørnWildt wrote on May 08, 2008 at 02:03 PM
As I understand it we drop NOC due to spam (among other things). But it seems to me that any robot can create an user account and use that for whatever malicious purpose? At least there is no captcha or e-mail verification.13. AllKnightAccess wrote on May 08, 2008 at 07:24 PM
What about the daily SVN Snapshots? They have stopped working since May 5th.http://community.postnuke.com/module-SVN.htm
14. Simon wrote on May 09, 2008 at 12:12 PM
Well, we hope that eventually you won't register at trac, you'll register at community.postnuke.com and use your login info at Trac. I also believe GForge and its variants are specifically targeted via bots, and that instances of this are less common with Trac. There's also the added advantage that Trac is under active development, so any problems will be fixed quickly.I also believe I saw Akismet installed on Trac, which will help with anti spam.
Snapshots i'm not sure about - I'll investigate.