I’ve been hammered in the past for incomplete support solutions, and for bouncing between forum solutions and project sites. There are no excuses – it’s completely my fault. Every decision I made I felt like I had a good reason for, but quickly things began falling apart. Whine. Sniffle. Grunt.
I need your help. I want to make sure our next release has as much possible goodness in terms of support as possible, and to that end I would love to hear from you (and even better, recruit you!).
In The Beginning
I kept everything at CodePlex. We had a wiki there and even discussions. We quickly outgrew both, as the site’s search (at the time) wasn’t up to what we needed. The forums system, as well, didn’t quite do it for what we needed.
Please understand this isn’t a dig on CodePlex – I’m talking about when it first started; the feature set just wasn’t what we needed for the growth we saw.
I then moved to Community Server and moved the docs (as they were) to a home-grown system. Let’s just say both didn’t work out on the server I had. Too slow to handle the load and it was far too fragmented.
Next I moved to a home-grown system, a forum of my own creation as well as a site that was built around the approach of a knowledge base. I didn’t have time to complete it as I was hoping (and my forum committers evaporated) so I moved back to Community Server (on a bigger server) and transitioned the docs to a blog format.
The Issues
The Forums and the Project site are working fine, but something’s missing. I was hoping the docs would be a bit more organic (I didn’t use a wiki because of spam) and they aren’t.
The forums are dragging around 3 years of content and the menuing system is going to get out of control. Especially with all the stuff that’s coming in 3.0 (linq, templating, etc).
It just seems that managing that much info in one forums may not scale (in terms of information flow) and moreover, I really want to have the buglist, roadmap, source repo and comit list, etc all in one spot.
Ideas
I have a few ideas, but before I get to that here’s what I think we’ll need to handle:
- Linq Support. SubSonic will be a “vector” for people learning linq. I want to be able to help them
- Pattern Support. There are some new approaches in SubSonic 3 (Repository, Unit of Work, etc)
- T4 template support and sharing. This is CORE to what I want to do, and I think these t4 files should be easy to find, ratable, etc.
- Standard support stuff (installation, extension, etc)
- Source integration – I want people to be able to browse the code
- Bug Tracker – this really should be part of the site as one unit
- Wiki?
I’ve been looking at a lot of solutions – Trac is one that came straight to mind. Ideavine (James Avery’s/Nate Kohari’s project site) is another. Inevitably, however, some things just fall through.
I can try to leverage our Google site more. Their wiki is pretty nice and the Groups are pretty decent forums. It just doesn’t have the polish I’m after!
Bottom line: I’m stuck. I want to devote most of my time to bug fixes (not to mention the other things I’m working on) – I’m just spread too thin for maintaining what I need to maintain.
Your thoughts are appreciated. And if you’re comment is “yah, your stuff really sucks” you don’t need to repeat it 
. Perhaps you can help me un-suck it.
