What is One Guy From Barlick?

One Guy From Barlick is a great community site that Doc has had running for years now.  He has a respectable membership base who contributes regularly.  It's a somewhat modified version of Skyportal which is running stably and smoothly (knock on wood) for some time.  Being forward thinking, Doc is deciding on a new direction for OGFB and he's being steadily convinced that Drupal is the way to go.

This small and humble community has offered to help see if Drupal can recreate and then, hopefully, greatly extend the OGFB site while maintaining the community and charm of it's current implementation.  This site is a hastily created effort to be a Skyportal-like site.  Most everything is here (down to the menus) is designed to have a Skyportal look and feel.  When I started this site, my goal was to create a place like Skyportal where developers, designers, and people just generally interested community sites share ideas about what the portal should do and in what direction it should spread technically.

As I see the organic direction into which this site is headed, I'm realizing that a Skyportal-like site might not be the most appropriate paradigm for using Drupal to guide a community to build a Skyortal-like site.  In other words, I'm going to change this site around to make contributing easy and finding contributed information easy and well-organized.

On this site, most of the information so far has been put in the forums.  Old habits die hard.  Skyportal relied almost solely on the forums, I can't remember clicking the Articles link more than a handful of times in many years of use.  Forums are great, but I'm trying to get information broken out into other areas..  Forums are for general purpose open to the public (since Groups seems the way to go in terms of privacy and exclusion), and forums aren't compatible with Groups.  Blogs and Articles can be categorized, associated with Groups, and associated with users.  Unlike Skyportal, the categories can be n-deep.

Unlike Skyportal, this site will not end up looking like Skyportal even though it endeavors to help others create a site that DOES look like Skyportal.  Does this make sense?

Having said that, If this site is cruising in another direction from the old Skyportal, then:

What is One Guy From Barlick?

OGFB is a Skyportal Site with Skyportal configuration, modules, and themes.  It is a site that needs to be picked apart which will help identify how to configure Drupal and what modules will be necessary to create equivalent functionality.  It is a 3-column flexible with site with a header, left and right sidebars, a content area with announcements and content, a footer and some modification, It supports users with different roles and very useful administration information to configure and manage the site.  It has articles, pictures, games and other functionality.

Why OGFB?

Once we have completely defined the OGFB site, we've defined its Drupal counterpart.  That's where the fun begins.  Drupal is essentially an engine with lots of extensions to it.  There's lots of little puzzle pieces, but the all play nicely with one another.  So we map the functionally we've defined to Drupal modules, themeing, and, if necessary, custom Drupal mods.

Then we take a look at the Skyportal database.  I'm sure that among us, there's no real mystery there.  It doesn't look like Doc made any extensive changes to the core database.  Then we take a snapshot of the database and save to CSV files.  The Drupal Feeds  Module allows you to create a map from the CSV file to Drupal fields that you're using or you've created in your installation.  Import the data into the properly configured site, test it out, and just create a Drupal Distribution.  Then, OGFB will become the new defacto for a Skyportal-like site created using Drupal by the members of this site.

There are needs from members of the Skyportal community which haven't been addressed in years.  The Skyportal site has been literally on life support for months now.  But Doc's got a kick-ass site that's based on Skyportal.  He's been at it for many years now, but wants to be able to move forward with OGFB.  He's been using ASP for eons and hasn't had much (if any) experience in linux land.  I think that OGFB can be the right shot in the arm to get something going again.  It's an opportunity to introduce a Linux-based portal in a way that will remove any concerns that people have about running a site on a non-Microsoft platform.

What now?

There used to be a lot going on when there was a group of us brainstorming where to go and how to do it.  When people split off, they chose a portal of choice.  These portals were fairly mature and their development community was established and, in some cases, threatening.  But these communities were for portals that weren't like Skyportal.  In fact, with most of them, it involve a great deal of investigation and trial-and-error to get any of these other portals to even approach being Skyportal-like.  I guess that's a testimony to the quality of the development and the group that helped develop it.

I really think I'm getting real close to what the Skyportal site was.  But the closer I get, the more I realize that I want more current functionality in my site than Skyportal had.  So let's use OGFB as the model for the Skyportal site that this site will build using Drupal.  I'm working on messing around with the Groups, and the Taxonomy setup for this site while working to build a OGFB prototype.

So, whoever is interested, feel free to start blogging away.  Please notice the Groups and Taxonomy (categories) that are available when you do a Blog entry.  The same is true for Articles.  We need to define the site, develop a theme, and build a Drupal site from which we can create a distribution.  We all know Skyportal, so any of us can blog about specific Skyportal functionality, modules, and themes.  Some of us know Drupal and can blog about Drupal functionality as it pertains to OGFB.  And I'd encourage anyone to visit the OGFB site (I've included OGFB in my Keyword Links).  While all of this is going on, feel free to blog about webmaster tasks for Drupal from installation through Drush.  I'm pedaling as fast as I can, but we all remember what happens to sites where one guy keeps all the development. ;)

So feel free to join in.  Let's build a site!  I want Doc to have a direction choice for OGFB.  I also want to document the process so that others can see our efforts and benefit from our observations and findings.  There's lots of developing and documenting to do, so the more people who help out, he faster Doc is provided a new home for OGFB.