First, if you have not read the Forge/Roadmap yet, please do so now. It will answer most of you questions (I hope). As a very quick overview though, Forge is moving to an entirely new framework. This will facilitate more freedom on the part of project admins and well as a greater ability to add new services to Forge. If you have more questions, please subscribe to the forge-dev mailing list.
A project summary page has been created for every forge project. By default the page is the name of the project. There is both a shortname page and a page for the long name of your project. The shortname page redirects to the long name page. For example, the forge project has a page at forge and at Novell Forge. The forge page is actually just redirecting to Novell Forge. Each of your projects are set up, by default, in the same way. You can move these pages anywhere you need to within the wiki.
Project owners can now create and edit all of the pages that describe and inform users about their project, it's releases, it's needs, and it's goals. You are no longer forced to use the Forge template anymore. A set of custom tags and templates have been create to help unify the other services Novell offers, with the wiki. These allow you to report and inform others about your project.
Most of your administration needs can be fulfilled at Special:ProjectAdministration.
File administration, uploading new files, etc. can be done in a few different ways. Special:Downloads is a web interface for uploading files. You can also use Rsync or SFTP to upload your file releases.
On the forge website we showed a list of projects that you were a member of in the left hand column of every page. We did this because you could not edit your personal page by yourself. Now that we are moving to a wiki as the framework for Forge, you can create this list of projects yourself. This also give you the ability to add other pages to the list that you are interested in. I would suggest you create this list on your user page. You can always access your user page from the bottom of every page.
To categorize your project, use the wiki categories. See Help:Editing#Categories for information on how to categorize your pages. The main Project Hosting page has a 'Browse' link on it. This browse link is to the set of categories that projects are categorized in. When we initially create your wiki pages we also categorized them based on your trove categorization. There are lots of categories and sub-categories to choose from. If the available categories do not fit your project, you can always add a new category just by categorizing your project differently. You will want to make sure that your project at least ends up in the Category:Projects category.
Developer and anonymous access to the source repositories has not changed, except that we have added an https interface to the subversion server. You can find directions on how to use the services at Help:Subversion or Help:CVS.
File administration, uploading new files, etc. can be done in a few different ways. Special:Downloads is a web interface for uploading/downloading files. You can also use Rsync or SFTP to upload your file releases.
The file server can be found at http://forgeftp.novell.com/ or ftp://forgeftp.novell.com/. You can also direct people to the Special:Downloads page. This page proxies the forgeftp server and give you some additional abilities, such as upload of files and making file private.
Your user page always has a link in the left hand navigation to the Special:Keyupload page. This page will allow you to upload your public keys for use in file uploads and repository access. You can paste in your key or upload a key file.
If you find a bug with this site you can report it at http://devzilla.novell.com/forge/index.cgi.
If you find a bug with another project on this site, you will need to find out how that project deals with bug reports. Search for the project page in the box on the left or browse all of the projects. If the project page does not tell how to report a bug, contact the administrator of that project.
If you want to log a bug against a Novell Product, please visit the Official Novell Bugzilla. If you are looking to submit a bug against a SUSE Linux product, please read about the proper procedures at OpenSUSE.org.
There is a custom tag available to display a list of your project mailing lists. We suggest that you use this tag on your summary page. The mailman web interface is currently located at http://forge.novell.com/mailman/listinfo/list-name.
You can edit almost any page on this site. If you see mistakes or have done something interesting with one of the projects, write a little bit about it. You can not edit files stored on any of the remote servers (CVS, Subversion, File) unless you are given specific rights from the project maintainer.
The Novell Project Hosting Services are just that, a set of services available to you to help your development process. 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.
This site is now the document reference library. We hope that most short documents that you write for your project will be available as a wiki page. Longer documentation may need to be stored in your file storage area and linked to from the wiki. If you have word processor documents or PDF files you can upload them to this site and link to them as well. All of the files and links from the old reference library have been migrated to the wiki and exist as pages on this site.
© 2009 Novell, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
