FeedbackApp:candidates

Candidates

These are notes from the beginning of the project, when we were evaluating similar, existing feedback apps.

Drupal + VotingAPI

Website: http://www.drupal.org , http://www.drupal.org/project/votingapi

Description: Brainstorm uses Drupal as a base and builds their own system on top. Drupal has modules to do a lot of the same things, including VotingAPI, a well developed and established Drupal module.

Pros

• Simpler, quicker, cleaner than molding Brainstorm or Pligg to our needs
• powered by Drupal

Cons

• Drupal has a history of numerous security vulnerabilities

Pligg

Website: http://www.pligg.com
Demo: http://abuchanan.sm-cms01.mozilla.com/pligg/

Description: Pligg is an open source content management system, based on Digg, for the purpose of a Digg-like news website

Pros

• Lots of requirements are already covered by Pligg
  • such as users, voting, content management, categories, tags, spam negation, search, RSS, more
• From the technical side Pligg...
  • ...uses Smarty templates, <3 Smarty
  • ...has a modules system
• Candy
  • Top users
  • Live submission watch
  • Some Javascript UI candy
    • Con - it doesn't use jQuery to do this ;)

Cons

• Pligg is geared towards news content, this would have to be modified, although it looks to be a small modification
  • How much work? Well, link.php is one file that would have to change (link.php defines the class for saving submitted stories. link.php is included in about 48 different files. No class hierarchy exists for link/stories :(
• it takes 15 friggin' minutes just to get to the docs...
  • ...which are in a forum, so you have to have an account, then log in, accept the forum rules, get back to the docs page, ... weak
  • developer docs apparently don't exist

Ubuntu Brainstorm

Website: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brainstorm
Existing site: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/
Demo: not up yet, waiting on DB http://abuchanan.sm-cms01.mozilla.com/drupal_brainstorm/

Description: Brainstorm is used by Ubuntu as their Feedback app. Brainstorm is based on Drupal 5

Pros

• Lots of requirements are taken care of
• All the benefits of Drupal 5

Cons

• not packaged (tarballed) so bzr version control is required to get code
• requires postgres >= 8.2. khan has 8.1
• not really a drupal module outside of hook_menu, hook_perm

Feature Diff

Both Pligg and Brainstorm have a lot of features that cover requirements, this is where the do/don't overlap

Both Have

• content management
• categories
  • auto-categories: most popular, recent, etc
• rating system
• comment system
• user accounts
• search
• spambot negation
• RSS

Brainstorm has, but Pligg doesn't

• idea submission, not news
• duplicate reporting
• idea status
• linking to a bug
  • although this is made for Launchpad, not Bugzilla. Could be a simple modification though
• help promote this idea

Pligg has, but Brainstorm doesn't

Since Brainstorm is based on Drupal, it comes with a whole repository of modules, so many things Pligg has over Brainstorm possibly could be enabled through Drupal modules

• comment voting
• top users
• tags
• Live watch