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coordino.com

116 pointspstadler39 comments

What's the difference to other systems like this? For example OS QA [1] seems to be quite popular/established?

Experiences, anyone?

OSQA is based on Django, which makes it somewhat harder to deploy. I know because we package it as a BitNami stack http://bitnami.org/stack/osqa and also use it for our Q/A site http://answers.bitnami.org Without actually having tested Coordino yet, I believe the fact that it is based on PHP should make it easier to adopt and extend. It will be interesting to see if it gets traction, there are plenty of StackOverflow clones that have been abandoned over time. An important factor in choosing OSQA was the fact that even though it was open source, it was backed by a company. A Q/A site, like forum software, is not something that you can move away from easily once you have content in it.

Having just installed Coordino in under 5 minutes (from git clone to login) on my Mac workstation at the office, I can attest to the ease of deployment.

We've been looking for an in-office knowledge base solution but we're a bit lazy (more accurately swamped with client work) so this was a no-brainer to try when I saw it was PHP.

I find it's installation method, like most PHP programs, to be somewhat off-putting. Yeah, it's great for a development box--place in front of a web server and hit the browser to finish up--but it's a nightmare for automated deployments: source code and configuration are two different assets that _should_ exist in two different places on the filesystem. When they do it's reliable to update one or the other without issue, else it's a bit chancy for my tastes.

Yes I can attest to the ease of OSQA/Bitnami. It's what I used to create http://chicagofounders.com. Thanks for including OSQA on Bitnami, as it was a relatively simple deployment!

A Q/A site, like forum software, is not something that you can move away from easily once you have content in it

Why not? If it has a decent API it should be easy.

The problem is that you need to move the content, user accounts, ratings, etc. from one system to another. The existing system has to had an API to export that information in a format that the new system can understand. If you have that, then it is easy, the problem is most systems out there do not have that :) Situation is a bit better with extremely popular projects for blogs or forums, like Wordpress or phpBB, which have an ecosystem of exporter/importer tools.

in a format that the new system can understand

Or you can write your own converter - it probably takes ~30m to whip up something in Python.

Something - yes. Something which implements everything required and is tested - not likely.

There's a huge difference between converting data from your little hobby and converting the vital knowledge of your company. It's different because it's more mission critical - you don't want to screw it up.

It's also different because the bigger dataset is likely to have some customizations and other "small" stuff which tends to matter in big perspective. You might be okay for losing e.g. votes if it's a small data set, but you really want it in with a big one.

Sorry, that's nonsense. Each one of the systems is going to have a different schema and constraints for users, posts, comments, votes, that most likely will not have a one-to-one mapping.

depends on the system - 30 minutes is not enough to convert users, groups, permissions, threaded conversations, voting, keywords, etc, especially if both systems do not use the same data model.

About a month ago I installed OSQA and 'shapado' -- http://shapado.com/ QSQA appeared much more rounded compared with shapado, and behaved much more like StackOverflow. Only problem I have had with QSQA is that changing the theme / template could be easier.

Oh, and by default the admin page of QSQA had a strange almost intelligible layout. However this is a mode that can be turned off... Once you find the option.

QSQA also has a neat 'community bootstrap' mode that lowers the required reputation for many actions, linking URL's down votes, etc.

All in all very happy with QSQA.

Askbot http://askbot.org is a very easy to install app - installation uses standard Python methods and there is even a configuration script that will help you deploy it (and all dependencies are satisfied automatically too).

In comparison, Askbot is faster than both Shapado and OSQA and can be with ease deployed along with other Django applications.

Of all open source Q&A forums as far as I know, Askbot is the only one to have any significant number of unit tests.

Like OSQA, Askbot is backed by a company, now based in Chile and this year it is supported by StartUp Chile business incubator!

I would also like to know how it compares to Shapado: http://shapado.com

I remember hearing in one of the first StackOverflow podcast that Jeff wanted to release the software as OS in and indefinite future, guess that Joel did not support that and now they are too successful to consider it again, in any case I can see why it would be disadvantageous after they changed their business model from third party hosted Q&A sites to the Area51 process.

Upvote, I posted an almost identical comment to your's a couple hours after your post. That will teach me to read through the comments before commenting:)

Was it really necessary to completely rip off Stack Overflow's design?

"A FREE PHP StackOverflow Clone" - I think its title shows where it gets its inspiration from :)

There's a difference between inspiration and copying. It is also bad marketing if you don't have enough personal image to be identifiable.

That's what I thought...

Hi Folks,

I maintain the Coordino project on GitHub located here: https://github.com/Datawalke/Coordino At the moment the project is somewhat stagnent as I work on some major improvements.

If you have any questions please feel free to ask. Thank you.

Could you please make it look a bit more unique (i.e. different than stackoverflow and the other stackexchange sites)? Most people won't bother changing the default template, and most people who end up on a hosted version of this software will then think it's run by Stack Exchange Inc. I'd like to avoid that situation as it causes us a bunch of administrative busywork and confusion to the interneters.

Congrats, man! Have you worked on this for a while and then open sourced? Looks like a lot of code for just a few commits. We work on askbot, here is the repo https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel, but our project is in Python/Django. Cheers.

Evgeny.

I think a StackOverflow style app would be powerful, and yet I don't want to add yet another "knowledge base" style application on top of, say, an internal wiki, ticket tracking systems, git commit messages, et cetera.

What do you use to tie these things together, and how do you decide what goes where? The line seems to blur between Q/A-style like Coordino and a wiki, in particular. Does anybody integrate these different knowledge systems well?

I'm a tremendous fan and frequent user of various StackExchange sites, and I've been looking for places to use a tool like OSQA or Coordino.

I wonder, though, about the scale required. My sense is that for sites like StackOverflow and Hacker News:

Quality = Quantity + (Filtering, Sorting, Ranking)

The software provides the second term, but I wonder how many responses or frequent posters/commenters one needs to have sufficient quantity. Any data on this?

You should checkout Askbot, it's used in many places, easy to install, test cases and documentation.

[1]http://askbot.org/

Fonts are way too small for the over-40 crowd -- and if it is a product for the Intranet, that's an important demographic.

Change them?

Interesting. This reminds me of the stackoverflow podcast where Joel and Jeff argued about open sourcing the stackoverflow engine.

Joel was against it because they were building stackexchagne at the time and he didn't want to compete against competitors like this using their own engine.

Also;

http://www.question2answer.org/

Maybe this is not the best place to ask this, but is there any SO clone written in Ruby?

Shapado [http://gitorious.org/shapado]

Here's the Github repo https://github.com/ricodigo/shapado

I stood up a few OSqa sites recently:

http://lostquery.com - Database FAQ

http://zealotrush.com - Starcraft FAQ (other games too)

What's the licence on this? GPL? LGPL? ASL? Can't find any info on their site for this

Edit: looked at the github, seems to be BSD-compatible

Torn,

The License is MIT based.

Is it written in CakePHP, or is their website just made with that? (Assumption from the favicon)

did they steal github's logo?

(edit: nevermind...)

It looked like it at first, since I block JavaScript by default. Their menu system covered most of the page except for the github logo next to a "download now" link.

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