Hi Francois,
We could be interested in hosting & managing the forums. However, I need a little more info please.
1. What are the current space and bandwidth requirements?
2. Do you have any problem with it being converted from phpBB to, say, SMF? (I am not a fan of phpBB and prefer not to use it. Should the forums grow sufficiently, we would look at vB).

We have a small team, which is fully bi-lingual in French and English and we have the capacity to host and setup the forums, so if you are interested please drop me an e-mail.

hi Francois,

I am interested to host the forum… and i have in house expert in phpbb to keep it in shape.. hopefully.. i run a very popular portal using phpbb with hacks… so.. drop me an email… and we can go in detail. i have the server ready. i would love to help b2evo very much cause i am going to use it.. i want this project to stay alive :)

thanks

-vincent

The phpBB database is 32 MBytes large.
The maximum bandwidth ever user by the b2evolution site was 15 GB/month in January. July was 10 GB. I’d say the forums account for 70% of this bandwidth.

I don’t know SMF. Has anyone else here had experience with this tool. Is it a good alternative from a user point of view? Is licensing okay?

Thanks.

Oh this is very cool! Now we have 2 offers ;)
How do we choose? Both of you okay with the bandwidth? Anyone interested in hosting and managing another part?
Also, could you guys please point to one of your servers so we can check response time?

–

Update: we’d also need someone to maintain a demo.b2evolution.net site. I’ll update the post above in a second.

SMF is great. I’ve stopped using phpBB and others and have switched to using SMF whenever I create a forum on a site. I highly recommend it.

Can’t wait for the alpha!

I have some interest in working on the b2 hacks site. I’ve got some limited integration with surveys and image archives going and wouldn’t mind sharing my code. I don’t think I can host but I’ll contribute and possibly work on coding patches.

I like the Wiki idea, and I’d gladly host it for you if you’d like. I just need to know some bandwidth stats…

FAQ, Manual and How-To? Sounds really fun…

I got 750mb space and 50GB bandwith per month available for this I believe. I’m planning to open up an informational Blog community using b2evolution, but the current features that b2evolution offers is still limited, and I’m looking forward for the next major release. I’ve been working on some simple template for b2evolution, and I figured out the difficulty in understanding the basic templating system, especially knowing which function resulting what, and which one that we need, and bla bla bla….

So anyway, to help the community, and helping the almighty b2evolution developers that had spent their precious time in developing this wonderful system, I will help hosting FAQ, Manual and How-To. I don’t know whether all this three sections can be combines together or not. Francois, feel free to email me back anytime…

My username in the forum is “djamoer". Looking forward to hear from you… I will try to figure out a way to combine them all together. Please email me back first, so that I can reply you what I can do with this sections..

Btw, I need a lot of contributor to help me work on this FAQ, and How To. The manual, I believe it will need to be released by developer, but with the help of FAQ and How To that are being contributed by the user, we can assign some contributors to start combining them into manual. How’s that sounds? If I get the wrong idea please correct me…

Cheers….

Regards,
Wendy Novianto
DJAMOER

I have a dedicated fedora server hosted at aplus.net that i can give you guys hosting room (i have 70 GB free on the server) and a couple of mysql databases. I have a monthly alotment of 1000GB transfer so that is not a problem from what im reading above. I could set you guys up a plesk account for one of these sites.
I rent the server for a client so it is already paid for and they barely even tap its resources. Its not the fastest server (only a fedora 2.4GHZ with 768 ram) but it will do. I am a webdesigner with a background in PHP and MySql and maintain a couple of other servers for the company i work for. If you guys are interested send me an email. I use the B2evo software for my companys intranet so id love to see this software grow.
my email is rh-at-viraldesigns-dot-com

Hey,

We got a lot of response from b2evolution fans… Heheheee…. Keep it coming guyss… ;) So that we can get the best hosting place for b2evolution :D

Another cheers from mee… :D

I also have some interest in hosting the plugins.b2evolution.net. I could add it to the shared webhosting that we’re using for our site, or if Wendy wants to host it, I could help look after it. We’re looking at upgrading our web hosting account and this would be a good reason. The package we use now has 160 GB transfer, and we’re not using more than 1/3 of it. Drop me an email, Wendy or Francois, I would be glad to help:

personman2 at gmail dot com

-Danny

It warms my soul to see all of you guys offering to help like this! Looks like my fears about the future of b2evo are being resolved one by one. And thanks Francois for the plug in this post. It really doesn’t take all that much time to run one of these sites once you’ve got a decent frame work going. Here’s to b2evo pheonix (or 1.6 as it’s currently called in cvs)!

Anybody got any reply from Francois or developer team? Do you think somebody has started with the future website of b2evolution?

Ehmm….
Anyway, I tried to figure out the best way in setting up a collaboration system for b2evolution community to have a better solution for what Francois looking for. I found two solution for the FAQ and Documentation system.

First is Wiki, a well known collaboration tool, which has been used by major opensource community. It is quite interesting to trusted visitor in editing the document without any restriction. Might solve the problem, but I figure out that the page is not easy to navigate sometimes, and the structures/contents are not well maintained, because of the lack in moderation of the system.

So I’m proposing the second solutios, which used the old school way in creatine documentation. We still need volunteer in becoming a moderator, which is what we need the most, because we need some people to commit themselve with the free community/documentation for b2evolution, and we let other users to contribute in commenting each documentation that was made, as well as commenting to add more section or providing some part of the documentation. It can be achieved in the forums and in the Documentation/FAQ commenting system.

Enough with the talk, I’m just giving my idea for this community anyway. Waiting for the response from the developer. ;)

I guess it is time for me to go to bed guyss… It’s 6am here. Hehehee…

Cheerss for the third timee…. :D

Hi everyone! I’ve been away for the week-end. I’m really glad to see all this response! :) Very cool! B)

I’ll get back to you guys later tonight. I think we’re going to try to split the subsites among as many hosters as possible. I like it that way. Because it’s in the community spirit. But also because if something goes wrong somewhere, everything doesn’t fall at the same time.

-François.

Feel free Francois to contact me whenever you should catch me on my blackberry through that email address. (im in and out of the office alot) I would be glad to host any of the sites as i mentioned above id love to give back to the B2evo community. It would be no problem to setup any of the sites i have time for that but i would need help with the moderation because work calls me out of town on a pretty common basis so it would be nice to have a teammate to help out.

All the best

(God i love this software im getting raves about it from my coworkers. Just setup the edit interface to use TinyMCE, i could include that in the plugin site =)

Good to see so many offers coming through.
The bandwidth and space requirements for the forum are no problem at all for us. My business partner, Nicolas, will drop you an e-mail shortly to let you know the details of the server we can put the forum onto.

I hope others will give more feedback on SMF - I’m biased as I really prefer SMF to phpBB :) We have done a number of conversions very successfully but, like all changes, there are always a few people who don’t like the change and just as many others who love it.

Quick update: I’m sending out emails individually. I am handling the sites one by one. I also got quite a few emails. It may take a few days before I get back to each of you. Thank you so much for your help! :)

Sounds good just let us know how we can help =) maybe even be part of the forums or something. I like SMF but maybe i can get my hands on a leased licence of vbulletin which i have used for a few clients not sure how that would fit in the whole opensource feel of b2evolution though. Just stay away from phpBB it has way to many security concerns constantly, makes me on edge when i hear the stories of hacks.

Sounds good to me too…
Is there any open source system that allows seperation of system files and database to serveral servers?

Haven’t seen one, but if there is, that will be awesome. Imagine running a single community with the same user account and solid interaction between each module and component, but yet the files and database are seperated into different server.

FOr example, one server running just the database, the other server handle the PHP prccessing job, and serveral minor server handle the static pages that was generated in a given interval or depends on the ammount of update being made to the static pages, they will also serves as file server for some of the module or system download.

Sounds too good to be true, isn’t it? ^_^

Just a small idea of mine, hope I can find somebody to turn this idea into reality :D

Anyway, all the best Francois, keep this community up and running…

DO I need to cheers again? ;)
Personman, cheers to you too… Hope we can work something out together :)

Regards,

Greetings Francois and everyone at b2evo,

My nickname on your forums is “War", I have integrated b2evo with my own custom made CMS ( FusionCMS ) and IPB (invision power board), in addition to creating free instant b2evo hosting ( http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=3682 ). Examples can be seen through the URL associated with this post.

I would love to help by hosting and maintaining the Forums or/and the manual/howto/faq.

As for forums, we could use your preferred choice of forums software and migrate. I currently use IPB (apparently IPB v2.1 would be amazing)and I do not mind buying a license specifically for b2evo, or a license for any other forum software. Ofcourse we could still go for phpBB as well.

I currently run several sites hosted on cihost and aplus, if you prefer another host then I would not mind signing up for it as well.

You could email me, or add me to MSN using the same email address on this post or on the forums and we could toss some ideas around.

All the best!

Wendy. That would be a job for LDAP I guess.
We have an LDAP plugin for b2evolution, but we haven’t set up a central user directory so far…

Any updates? Anybody received an email from Francois yet? i love how there are so many people willing to donate to the B2evo cause

Time for a quick update :)

So far if things turn out like they should, it would look like we’d go this way:
- forums : Cherie/Whoo & Elpie
- plugins : Danny/Personman (with Steven helping for the hacks section)
- manual : Wendy & Graham
- demo : Daniel
- skins : Graham (already set up)

Basically, I just gave priority to the people who have been contributors for the longest time and the ones who offered their help first. Now of course, it sometimes turns out someone thinks he can host this or what and for some reason he/she can’t. This is why I haven’t declined any offer yet. Everyone please stand by, and thank you SO much for offering your help!! This is really really cool! B)

Also, if some of you want to help editing/moderating/translating content, please feel free to contact the above mentionned people. They surely could use a little help.

Pretty much unrelated, but we’d also need help from graphics designers for some of the sites as well as for b2evo itself. Anyone? ;)

Guys, we need someone to vote on this forum.

http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=5043

Thank you