Since the past 10 days I have been working on a new version of the Belenix website. The website has undergone a major overhaul in terms of looks as well as features. Moinak had announced about a new Belenix server coming up courtesy Al Hopper and the Genunix folks about a month ago, along with a call for some help with the Belenix website. I replied and asked I could help, mentioning that I have some programming / maintenance / hacking around experience with Drupal and cook up any kind of website using drupal's modules and have managed servers in the past (my new blog, the college youth club portal, the sun club website, the virtual installfest website, college library website, etc). I also suggested some ideas for overhauling the site. Soon I was welcomed by the team and Moinak made an account for me on the new server. There's a couple of reasons I had taken up interest in it. One being that I wanted to give back to the community somehow. I am (right now) not that much into OS development, so I saw contributing to the website as a great way to give back something. Secondly, the plus point was that the website was made upon Drupal, of which I am a die-hard fan. And thirdly, I found it a great opportunity to work on a production Solaris server and sharpen my server admin skills. I had been more or less a linux/windows server guy till now with the administration of college servers I was responsible for and was always looking for an opportunity to get hands on to a Solaris server. It paves way for learning all the Dtrace hacking of Drupal for performance increase, security, debugging, etc. It's great. I've always wanted to find a converged opportunity covering both Solaris and web development.

Was	Is

So it took about 6 days for the development and 4 days for the migration and deployment of the website on to the Solaris host. The initial discussions did only take place on a private mail discussion with me, Moinak, Ananth, Shiv, Pradhap, Sriram and Anil.

The website needed a new theme. It had the old-style fixed width theme with little pizazz and I aimed to replace it with a new fluid width theme which would utilize page space most efficiently, providing more blocks to plugin stuff and make it more of a community portal rather than just a website. The belenix-discuss mailing list did not have a web frontend (as opposed to the other opensolaris hosted mailing lists having Jive forums) and so I saw it as a good opportunity to Drupalize the mailing list with listhandler and mailhandler providing a neat mailing list to forum bridge. The power and utility of a web-based forum is far more than a mailing list in my opinion (thought that opinion may be countered by many open source folks). It easier to search for answers, subscribe on a per-forum or per-discussion thread basis, see pictures of members, have a member rating system for motivation, see their number of posts (thus showing their "weight" in the community), etc. Next in mind was to create a dynamic community driven version of the Fanspeak section, where members can contribute not only screenshots or videos but also tips, tricks and code samples. More on that later (read community scoopzone below). We could probably also do with a planetopensolaris and planetnetbeans style blog aggregator of the blogs of the Belenix team to start with and then start a system to induce more Belenix community blogs. More ideas like an event management system and login integration of the mailing list with the website popped up and I mentioned all of them. The agenda ofcourse was to first have a revamped look and feel, an overhaul of the site and launch important new features. We initially discussed this on email and I even met Moinak and Shiv at the BOSUG meet when the Crossbow talk took place.

Once I was ready with half the work done, I showed it to the Belenix team for review. They suggested discussing it in the open. I had initially thought of just launching the new website and announcing all the good news together in one go, but they were right, its an open community and even website development should be discussed in the open. So I posted the first status update a week ago. At the same time, I introduced my idea of having a "Community ScoopZone", a Slashdot just for the Belenix Community ;).

I came to know about Belenix an year ago when I was appointed as a Sun Campus Ambassador. I've known, learned, explored, used, evangelised/promoted Belenix as much as OpenSolaris since then. I'd say that it is the Sun CA program which is spreading a lot of awareness about Sun's opensource technologies amongst university students and getting them to go and participate in them. Moinak has indeed spearheaded the Belenix community very well and we are all proud of what he is and has done. I joined the BOSUG and Belenix community aliases once I started using OpenSolaris and Belenix, to connect with the community, get to know about the latest developments, to get some support, and to give some if I can. I always wanted to give back and the website is a good way to do that.

The pain came when I had to move the Drupal instance from my laptop to the solaris server. I relate my migration story here. It took time to migrate the website to the host. The website has been hanging around on the server for 2 days now (uploaded there on June 2nd 2008). I have had a lot of problems making it work on the server, and it really wasn't as easy as just moving my drupal instance to the server. There were a lot of "Drupal on Solaris" glitches to address and PHP and Apache configuration directives to tweak to make it work up there, except the usual gotchas involved with a website running on a UNIX system (though that wasn't new).

I had uploaded the website as well as imported the database and loaded up the frontpage only to see a blank white screen - what is ubiquotously called the "White Screen of Death" in webapp lingo. I checked the error_log file , found some weird PHP errors, asked help at Drupal.org (my thread). All necassary measure to be taken when migrating a drupal instance across hosts were taken (put site in maintenance mode, disable clean URL's, etc.). mod_rewrite wasn't enabled so I turned it on and also enabled local .htaccess support for drupal's .htaccess settings to work. I tried reading up drupal documentation and adjusting php.ini as well as httpd.conf settings (increased php's memory limit, enabled all errors and notice reporting, etc.). I ultimately found out from Scott Matton's Blog about "Drupal 6 on OpenSolaris", that my include_path wasn't having reference to a "." ! That is why php wasn't able to include *.inc files required by drupal core and thus the Fatal Errors for function calls. I could finally get the site working and posted the solution to my own thread at Drupal :)

Anyway, after that I set the file upload path, setup the crontab (and mistakenly deleted the old ones!), add a security directy to .htaccess to disallow the public to run /cron.php, setup httpd-ssl.conf and uploaded some incorrect keys.

There were 2 problems then: no IMAP support in PHP (which is required for the forum-mailing-list bridge to work), and SSL wasn't working (was blocking port 443 somehow). From there I called Moinak for help, as things could get messy if I myself tried to recompile PHP on a Solaris server to include IMAP support and I had no idea about SSL configuration (besides openssl config is lengthy and scary). He has somehow broken his head against httpd.conf and enabled port 443 and even got the SSL handshake and issue of certificate to the browser, although it still doesn't open and gives a Data Transfer Interrupted. He is working on IMAP for PHP as well.

For now, I have disabled secure logins, so you can very much login the normal way (meaning the functionality of the site is not at all affected, it was just an additional security measure). The forums section wont show mails from belenix-discuss yet either :)

Here's a round up of all the new features of the Belenix website:

• Upgraded to Drupal 5.7
• New theme design complete
• New fluid width theme
• Inherits it's stlye from old theme
• Completely new layout
• Utilizes the page space most efficiently
• Much more place to plugin stuff
• Meant for a community portal and not just a portfolio website
• 6 user blocks, footer, header, content-bottom, content-top, and 2 sidebar blocks :)
• Cross-browser compliant.
• Belenix Community ScoopZone
  
  
  

  The Belenix Community ScoopZone provides a platform to developers and enthusiasts working in or on Belenix as well as OpenSolaris to be able to share their contributions (in the form of code samples, tips, tricks, FAQs, news items, articles and reviews) with the community at large through a social information sharing system. It is meant for driving community participation on the website. A lot of people accomplishing new hacks / tricks on Belenix or OpenSolaris share their ideas/work on mailing lists and in the OpenSolaris community. People blog about the latest news about open source. People bookmark good stuff, Digg it, share it on social bookmarking sites, etc. I thought we could provide a platform for this, just like SDNShare and Netbeans Zones is, with the voting / rating system in place for motivation. This is somewhat like the way Slashdot news is published. You can say that this concept is quite similar to Slashdot, though I would rather associate it with SDNShare since that's what inspired it to be made in the first place. It will serve as great way to aggregate knowledge in one place which might otherwise get scattered.

  I had initially thought about this idea when I had seen the Belenix Fanspeak Section. I am a regular user of SDNShare, Digg and the Netbeans DZone. Digg is familiar to more than half of the internet, especially the Web 2.0 Junkies. SDNShare is a Digg-like portal for contributing developer info/tech tips/samples with a built-in rating and voting system for both its content and the users who contribute. Its inspired from Digg. Similarly, there is Netbeans Dzone. And if you're geek, you probably (should) be knowing about Slashdot.
  
  ScoopZone is powered by Drigg, which is essentially a collection of Drupal modules for making a Digg clone. I found it while looking for a compelling solution to create a knowledge sharing community for Belenix. The (new) Belenix theme has been modified and tweaked all over to adapt and support the module, and it wasn't as easy as installing any other Drupal module.
  
  Here's the system: Any user can submit a "scoop". A scoop has to have a URL, a short description, some tags and a category. The description can be aleast X characters and upto Y characters. The current categories are: Article, Code/Script. FAQ, News Item, Tech Tip. There are 3 sections - published, upcoming and archived. On submitting a scoop, it enters into the "upcoming queue", where it waits until somebody "votes" for the scoop. Users can vote it up or down. After getting X votes it will be "promoted" to the "published" section (which is the main scoopzone page). If the scoop doesn't get a single vote in the next X hours it will move to the "archived" section. Apart from categorization (tech tips or articles, etc.) users can choose to see scoops within past 24 hours, past 7 days, etc. On the right sidebar, there are blocks for 'best upcoming scoops', 'best published scoops', 'best alltime scoops', and a tag cloud. Users can comment on scoops. Their profile picture will show with comments as well as scoops. There is an automatic member "ranking" system. Each user has a "karma", which is like a score calculated based on the number of scoops submitted, number of comments made on scoops of other users, number of votes give to other scoops, etc.
  
  Scoops even send a pingback to the original URL. There are RSS feeds for scoops, even for categories, and lot more. Check out Drigg's features.

  All inputs and suggestions on scoop categories, rules, improvements / modifications to the system and everything else are more than welcome and can be openly discussed at the belenix-discuss mailing list. You are the community, and you are the end-users. The users should decide how the system should be.
  

  With this, we have our very own slashdot. With careful and well planned execution, it can be a big hit. It should be exactly what the community wants, so I request inputs regarding everything - the rules, the concept, any barriers to acceptance, usability, features. It is not a new concept in the web2.0 world, most of us are familiar with it, but we need to tweak and tune it for the community and its needs. Please use it, and give your inputs, so that we can enhance it. All improvements can be contributed back to the Drigg project and in turn to Drupal.
• Community Map
  
  I have been involved with a lot of mapping projects lately. Following the first go at it with the JIITYouthClub.org member map, I went ahead and made a map of campus ambassadors, then a second version using Dapper and Yahoo Pipes and then took up a project to make a community map mashup. Drupal already provides all the tools required for making such a community map. The Belenix community map is a drupal gmap + location module mashup with some custom coding for geocoding to work.
  
  This is the official community map of all the members, developers and contributors of the Belenix OS and it's community. Every registered member of the website can mark his/her location using a map in account settings. You can mark location by clicking on the map or use the new geocode support to search for your address / city / state / country and get the marker to automatically appear at your location. The map is programmed to show different marker icons for different roles - core developer (red), new community member / normal user (blue), etc. It even has clustering support - shows a cluster icon where there are more than X users with a clubbed info window showing all their names together.
  
  Steps involved in getting yourself on the map:
  
• Click and open the "account settings" link (found at the top right corner of the screen, if you are logged in)
  
  
  
  
• You'll land up on a page with your username in the title and "Account settings" underlined. Scroll down to the "Location" section.
  
  
  You have 3 options here to mark your location on the map:
  1. Just click anywhere on the map to mark the location
  2. Search by your street address, city, state, country or postal code and press the Geocode button. The map will display a marker on the location resulting from the search.
  3. As a last option, you may get your location data (latitude and longitudinal values) from an external service (like Google Maps) and enter it directly into the text boxes.
  
  After marking your location, just submit the form.
  
• Done. Go to the Belenix Map page to see yourself on the map :)
  
  

With this system in place, one day we hope to see all users and fans of the Belenix Community on a map :)

• Forum-Mailing List Bridge: This is a forum based frontend to the community mailing list of the Belenix Distribution. Posts and threads are sync'ed between the mailing list and this forum. Forums are much more lucrative medium for communication. They are much more presentable than mailing lists, get more hits from google, are easy to search for answers, and have many more features (code highlighting, etc.). It builds a much better community. Take ubuntuforums.org for example. I propose to use a mail to forum bridge and start an online community parallel with the mailing lists. I know the Jive forums at opensolaris.org exist, but this can be much better.
• Mailing List Subscription manager: Now you can subscribe to belenix-discuss from within the website (thus keeping the subscription information within your belenix.org/net account) (http://www.belenix.net/admin/settings/mailman_manager)
• Belenix Planet - just an aggregator for the belenixy blogs. Earlier individual developer blogs are linked to from the main Belenix website, but something on the lines of planetnetbeans.org had to be done, thought not necessarily being open to all, only the closed set of core belenix developers and community contributors may submit their feeds to be aggregated at once place. You can opt to add your blog there. Visit the site contact page.
  
• Pretty icons, collapsible blocks, AJAX'ified UI, etc.
• Varius new features provided by new drupal modules installed, various tweaks (like SSL login, friendlier URL's, CAPTCHA for anti-spam, persistant logins, AJAX stuff, etc.). Read the discussion thread here to know in detail.
  

Please visit the new website at www.belenix.net. Belenix.org still points to the old website currently, and the DNS settings will be updated soon.

There is new bug category called "website" at the Issue Tracker of the Belenix Development Sourceforge project.

The new website is up and running now. It's time for you to go out and explore the new stuff. Please report any problems, suggestions, feature-requests, etc at the sourceforge tracker or if you think it is important then on this belenix-discuss thread itself.

Register, mark your location on the map, start scooping, spread the word !

This might be useful for someone. Here are a few pages I found handy for debugging drupal:

• Anyone having trouble moving a drupal install can get help here
• Tips for "White Screen Of Death":
• Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$theme in ...../theme.inc on line 45
• Fatal error: Call to undefined function node_get_types()
• All My Pages are Blank!
• How to troubleshoot (read this first)
• Another problem I face for a small time offline, the "administer nodes" problem.

Here's how it works:

Once you register, you can create a new a forum topic. When you do so, it will get emailed to belenix-discuss@opensolaris.org. Even replies to forum topic will get emailed, thus creating threads at the mailing list. An hourly cronjob runs which fetches email from an IMAP email account subscribed to the belenix-disuss@opensolaris.org mailing list, so vice versa, when a new email is received at belenix-discuss mailing list, a forum topic or comment is created (depending upon the subject), with authorship of the the person "From" which the email has come. If the user doesn't exist on the website, it will automatically be created by Drupal. If that person tries to register at the website later, he will be told that a user already exists with that email address, so in that case he will have to "request new password" to access the account. mail@belenix.org is subscribed to belenix-discuss@opensolaris.org for mail retrieval and sending to create the bridge. All mails from the forum will have a From field like <user's email address> <mail@belenix.org>. This is an advantage-cum-necassity as this will allow a user who is registered at the website but not the mailing list (though you subscribe to the mailing list from the website too) to post to the list (as the mail will be sent from mail@belenix.org, which is subscribed). This is the best that can be done as we don't have direct access to the list's mailman admin interface. All attachments on the forum will appear as links to those files at the website in the emails and vice versa. The belenix-discuss signature will automatically be stripped off when the messages appear on the forum. "Re: , AW:,FWD:,fwd:,[belenix-discuss]" will be stripped from the topic as well.

Note that only mails posted as of the time of creation of the bridge, 06:00 PM (IST) July 5th 2007, will appear on the forum. To see any previous messages, you should go to the belenix-discuss mailing list archives.

IMAP is now working on the server and so is the Drupal mail system. The forum-mailing list bridge is fully functional.

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