At BrainShare 2003, Novell Developer Services rolled out an exciting service - Novell Forge. Developer Services went through a detailed analysis to understand how best to improve the services and support that we provide to the developer community. Novell recognized the changing landscape within our industry and identified important adjustments that we needed to make. Novell Forge is just one initiative that has helped us make those adjustments. The Novell Forge site was designed to help system administrators, corporate developers, ISV, CSI, consultants, and systems analysts by providing them an environment for code collaboration, technology and vertical market communities, forums, discussions, code samples, and FAQs. Novell Forge has been very well received and now has 800 projects and 40,000 users.
The efforts to enhance Novell Forge are ongoing and Novell Developer Services is now planning additional changes. Currently Forge offers such services as mailing lists, NNTP forums, CVS, Subversion, file storage, document & sample code storage, Red Carpet Server, bug tracking, task management, reference library, job listings, general news, project news, communities, (broken) surveys, and FAQs.
Novell now plans to improve the current Forge UI and update the Forge website to a new look. The previous Forge website, as you know it, will no longer be available. Most of the functionality that was available in Forge will be moved to the new developer wiki pages. In other words, the framework that connects all of the Forge services will now be the wiki instead of the forge website. A wiki is a website that allows collaborative editing by any of its users. One of key attributes of a wiki is that its content can be changed very quickly by anyone who uses it.
Special pages will be set up to deal with Project Creation, Project Administration, and so forth. A set of wiki extensions or custom tags will be available to all to access or display information about the different services. Templates are also being created for use by hosted projects. These changes and other will allow the Novell project hosting services grow in quantity and quality over time.
Novell Forge, in some aspects, has been a "cathedral-style" development environment. One of our goals with the upcoming changes is to make the experience more of a "bazaar-style" development environment.
Currently when you start a Novell Forge project, a full set of framework services are setup for you to use. One thing we have learned from the last few years of hosting open source projects is that developers all work differently. Every project seems to desire a different set of services. If you don't want to manage your tasks with a task manager, you probably don't want an empty task manager for your users to get confused with. In response to this, we are planning to make the services less tightly coupled with the web site. In the new project hosting paradigm, you request only the services that you want to use. (In fact, you can start using some of them right now, without even telling us.) We think this new direction is more closely aligned with the open source development model. If you already have a source repository, but want to use our mailing lists, that's great. If you get tired of maintaining your own repository and want to start using ours, that can be done at any time too. It is your choice. No matter where your repository is, you can make a link to it from your project wiki page. You can tailor your pages to fit your needs.
For your reference, the current state of each newly designed Forge service will be available at the links below.
Your summary page, with the information you want on it. Our suggestion moving forward is to start your project before you ask us for approval and before you need any other resources. To get started all you have to do is create a new wiki page and put any information you think is necessary to describe your project there. Put all of your planning and Pre-development work on the wiki. Diagram your project. Plan the direction your new project will take. Then, if you have need of further services, such as a source repository or a place to put file releases, you will need to register your project with Novell. This process requires you to tell us a little bit about your project and allows you to register a name for your project.
The current summary pages contains a description of your project, some statistics, news items that you post, forum and mailing list information, and file release information. The description and news will be replaced by wiki functionality. The statistics, forums, mailing lists, and file information can all be placed on your summary page by the use of Help:Custom Tags that have been created for this purpose. This means that you may (or may not) have to perform a little bit of maintenance to keep your project page up to date, but you gain the ability to place any information that you want to there, giving you the ability to better reach your target audience.
There will be very few changes to the mailing lists. Currently there is an interface on the Forge website for any user to subscribe/unsubscribe to your mailing lists. This will not be available anymore. You will have to use the mailman interface. The mailman interface is more powerful than the interface we made available so we will just expose it better. We will provide a theme to mailman so it feels like you are still on the same site. From the project administration page you will be able to add and remove mailing lists for your project, subscribe members to your list, and reset your list admin password.
The changes for this area are still under review. The current thinking is to allow all of the same interfaces into NNTP. We are currently using newsportal to allow a web view into the NNTP forums. This code will probably be ported to a new wiki special page. The actual NNTP forums may be changing at Novell. If they do, we will have to make some adjustments.
The developer access to CVS will not change. Two major changes will occur to CVS though. We are planning to make viewcvs publicly available. Currently you have to go through a proxy PHP page to access viewcvs. This causes a few problems. We are planning to expose the viewcvs interface directly. CVS management, creating a repository for your project, giving/removing commit rights, adding commit notification, etc. will all be available from the Special:ProjectAdministration page. All of the capability was available on Forge in a very similar fashion. It will just be moving to the wiki.
There are a few templates available right now for use to show people how to access your CVS repository from the wiki. Template:CVS Instructions gives instructions on how to use CVS. Template:CVS Browse is used to link to viewcvs. If you use this template, when we change the URL for viewcvs your link will be automatically updated. There is also an extension written to take advantage of the koders search indexes. Koders has indexed all of our CVS repositories. We have created a custom tag that will let you search through your source repository.
Subversion changes will be similar to the CVS changes listed above. The templates Template:Subversion Instructions and Template:Subversion Browse are available. Koders search is currently only available for CVS.
File storage will be changing only in the fact that the web URL for browsing the file system will change. You can now browse the files you have released by visiting Special:Downloads/project_name. You can still access the files directly at http://forgeftp.novell.com or ftp://forgeftp.novell.com. You will also still be able to use rsync and sftp if you are a file manager for a project.
Currently on Forge there are tabs specifically for documentation and sample code. We are going to do away with these all together. A wiki is available for documents and sample code now. We would suggest that you use the wiki for this type of information. If your documentation needs to be in a different format, such as a pdf or an office document, we do allow uploading most document types. You can upload these files to the wiki and link to them as a media source, for example [[media:DocumentName.odt]]. Another option is to upload the files your project file store. You can then link to the URL of the file directly or use the <file> custom tag to display the link for you. The <file> tag will display the size and date of the file along with its name.
The Forge Red Carpet Server is still running, but the interface to it is broken. This will be fixed.
Bug tracking currently uses very old code that was ported from some very old version of SourceForge. The tracker has many problems. Our solution here is to turn off the Forge trackers and turn on Bugzilla. We are in the process of setting up a Bugzilla service right now. Each project will be able to have their own Bugzilla service that they can manage. We are currently not planning on migrating all of the bugs due to the vast differences in schema between the two services. We will leave the old service available in read only mode as long as needed.
Currently Forge has a built-in task management application. We are planning on decommissioning this. We do not have any immediate plans to bring up another task manager of any sorts. We would like project owners to begin using bugzilla and the wiki for more of their project management tasks. If we find that this is not sufficient we will look into other options. If you have strong feelings about this, either for or against please let us know.
The reference library existed as a place to put general information such as sample code or howto articles. This is no longer needed as the entire developer site is a wiki, therefore the current reference library will be decommissioned. These types of general documents can now be edited live on this site. We hope many people will take advantage of this. There is a Developer Library page that we are organizing as a landing page for all documentation and sample code. Notice the categories that are available there and throughout the site. Make sure when you create a page on the site that you categorize your information so others can more easily find it.
This feature of Forge was rarely used. It will no longer be available. If someone would like to set up a Jobs page, that would be fine. You can also post needed help on your own project wiki page.
The general news available on Forge will be replace by syndicated news on the Current events page.
Project News is displayed on the Developer Home page now. To post news there, visit the Talk:Project News page and post a description of your news item and a link to it. Examples and instructions are available on that page. Each day (or so) one of the wiki sysops will read through the news items an move them into the Project News article. This will automatically push them to the Developer Home page. We suggest that you post your actual news on your project page, or on a page that you link to from your project page, for example, Forge and Forge News
Communities have been mainly a way to bring together many projects; a way to get similar initiatives seen by each other. This can happen by anyone in the wiki. We will no longer be the only ones who can set up communities. We will probably set up a few that we are interested in, and hope that you will do the same.
Surveys will not be put into use on the new developer wiki. There are other ways to gather information though. One way is to use the talk pages available with every article in the wiki. For instance, we want to know your reaction to the changes we are making to Forge. We would appreciate if you would leave us a note on the Talk:Forge/Road Map page.
Currently FAQs are available in a separate area in Forge. With the wiki, this is no longer needed. If you want to create a FAQ page, just create a new wiki page linked from your project page.
Statistics are a new feature of Forge. These statistics will continue to be available. If you want to see the stats for your project we have made some custom tags available.
The timeline for all of these changes is not completely solid. The goal is to have the major changes completed by the middle of February 2006.
Update --Devsupaul 13:27, 12 April 2006 (MDT)
The first steps have been taken. Major parts of the Forge website now redirect to the developer wiki, including starting projects, administrating projects, file browsing, and more.
Update --Devsupaul 10:51, 25 May 2006 (MDT)
We are planning to make the final migration changes on the last day of June. All of the forge pages will be redirected to the corresponding wiki pages.
A small guide has been put together describing how to navigate the new interface for the Forge services. You can find that on the help for forge users page.
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