Hacker News Reader

Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

If the goal of this is to supplant vBulletin and phpBB, it has to be written in PHP, period. A non-programming community is not going to deploy a RoR app, they're going to FTP some files into the hosting they just bought from GoDaddy.

View on HN

Once upon a time people said that creating stuff in PHP was ridiculous as Perl in cgi-bin was way more supported.

As was mentioned, we have a hosted offering planned so people can set up a forum in a few clicks.

But besides that we actively want to work to make Ruby apps easier to install. Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that.

At the very least we'll offer VM images and install scripts for various cloud hosts.

RoR just isn't good at this. It's had more than enough time to position itself as an alternative to PHP. Node looks promising.

I think you're just living in the HN bubble there laddo!

Nice ad hom. Care to state why you disagree?

Hint, to start provide a giant tar.gz with all relative paths, with everything included inside, all the libs, rails itself, and so forth. Make it trivial to install it providing a proven environment with the right versions of everything.

> Right now they're too hard and we're going to try and fix that.

Awesome! I was trying to point out to someone that this is a critical market-share-limiting factor for Rails apps the other day. It's good to know that someone's devoting time to the problem.

For an example of the difficulty of installing Rails apps, take a look at the length of the installation guide for Gitlab [1]. There are seven numbered steps, some of which involve multiple commands. Upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 was about the same complexity.

Thanks to the thoroughness of its author, the guide largely worked as advertised. But being able to install and upgrade with apt-get would have saved me hours.

Please also keep in mind making it easy for people to upgrade your app -- that's just as important as installing it.

[1] https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/stable/doc/install...

If you make Ruby apps as easy to install as PHP then that will quite possibly be a much bigger achievement than writing a new forum could ever be.

If you look on the discourse.org website, they are planning to eventually sell a hosted version (including custom domains). Discourse is taking VC funding, and that's their plan for making money.

This could be sold by third parties as a standalone thing where some hosting company manages the deployment for you.

There is market for similar services based around phpBB.

Sold, rebranded, tinkered to the point where its not recognizable any more- yep!

Rebranding could be considered a feature depending on your point of view. Most phpBB hosts don't seem to screw with it too bad apart from maybe inserting a few ads.

That didn't stop a bunch of services selling 'free phpBB' installs littered with malware advertisements, to people who didn't know how to deploy a PHP app.

I'd imagine there's a market for a generic push-button "insert dev-provided VM, recieve app" hosting service for these kind of people without being limited to PHP. AWS Marketplace already does this to a degree, just a matter of making a similar service accessible to the GoDaddy crowd.

And to add to your point, since Discourse is taking VC money, it will not supplant phpBB, vBulletin and the likes. Absolutely free software that's been around for more than a decade and web hosts don't have to pay for it either.

And if a website owner wanted to migrate from oldskool forum software that's been around since the dawn of the internet to Discourse, oh man.

Doesn't seem that much harder http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1091/installing-a-ru...

No.

Discourse does not have a strong incentive to make their software easy to install. Following the WordPress business model, Discourse wants you to pay them to host your forum.

Surely something like this + heroku + a deal with godaddy would make it even better and easier.

The non-programmers aren't going to want to ditty around with copying files from a CD, they will just want to run setup.exe.

If someone is going to setup and run a forum figuring out how to deploy a RoR should be a minimum barrier to entry worth an hour of research.

I setup about 50 forums on my hosted plan before I became a programmer and many of them went on to be quite active and useful. All I knew at the time was very basic HTML and CSS. Once I actually started programming, RoR was a pain in the ass to setup the first time, it definitely took much longer than an hour (I even gave up on my first try).

So no, this barrier of entry isn't needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com