I've been looking at Redmine to take over the role of the Café and this Talk forum, i.e. everything in the current .jeelabs.net domains.
It has a wiki, a forum, a code repository interface, issue tracking, file/documentation areas, good user management, and search. It could in other words take on the role of a community site for Jee Labs. There is a plug-in to support the Markdown format, which should make it easy to bring over the current contents of the Café.
The drawbacks I see so far, in decreasing order of importance:
no Akismet spam filtering (will need tinkering, or accepting new user registration by hand) per-project structure, so forums need to be organized with care (not too many all over the place) a change requires thinking about what to do with the current Café and Talk site contents bit heavy, might become an issue when the amount of content grows over time
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There are a couple of reasons to change the current setup, IMO:
no edits by others and no search in the Café, currently no web interface to the subversion version control and source change history current distinction between Café and Talk prevents more collaboration on content, docs, plans, etc no public issue tracking and no versioning, it's all out of sight, i.e. on my desktop right now development of the Café wiki is virtually absent (it's on my shoulders, and not a priority) development of the Talk forums depends on bbPress, which isn't moving much either
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I'm not going to change things soon, after having been bitten by the previous attempt, but I'm sorta tempted to look into Redmine as a serious option, supporting all the current jeelabs.net activities with a single new site. Setup would not be a problem. The important decision is whether to move in that direction and stick with it in the long term.
Thoughts, anyone?
