MCS

Mozilla Community Sites Project

MCS is a project that is providing a complete website building experience to our community members to enable them to easily build a new website for their own community.

Discussion for this project is on IRC. Server - irc.mozilla.org Channel - #MCS Web Chat

Rationale

Our communities are serving tons of goals they own set up for themselves. They can focus on localization, promotion of open standards, quality assurance, documentation, extension development, evangelization or one of many other ways.

Mozilla's goal is to empower them and help them do what they want. One of the most important element of every community is a website. Our research indicated that building and maintaining a website is one of the most challenging and time consuming elements of working with a community. It's especially visible for smaller communities. For them, web design, website deployment, and keeping the web software up to date is a blocker to productivity that sharply reduces time they can spend on actual goal of their community.

Elements

MCS is a system that is made of several elements that are open sourced, free for use and can be combined according to the needs of its users. The tools are:

• Mozilla Community Hosting is a program that helps set up hosting for a community website
• Mozilla Community Domains is a program that helps get a domain for a community website
• Mozilla Community Site gives you an overview of what is a Mozilla Community Site and what are the components
• Mozilla Community Theme professional, polished theme created specifically for Mozilla Community Sites
• Mozilla Community Presentation Template pofessional, polished presentation template for slideshows
• Mozilla Community Logo. A logo designed to give a unifying element for all websites that consider themselves be a part of Mozilla ecosystem.
• HTML/CSS implementation of the theme that is a reference example that can be used for styling community website. It is supposed to follow web standards, accessibility guidelines and best practices.
• PHP. An extended HTML/CSS mockup with a flavor of PHP with several examples on how to use the theme with PHP.
• PHP builder. PHP application that will allow for an easy example theme customizations.
• Wordpress pack. Theme and extensions that will make Wordpress be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site CMS.
• Drupal pack. Theme and extensions that will make Drupal be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site CMS.
• phpBB pack. Theme and extensions that will make phpBB be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site forum.
• punBB pack. Theme and extensions that will make punBB be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site forum.
• Mediawiki pack. Theme and extensions that will make MediaWiki be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site wiki.
• PlanetPlanet pack. Theme and extensions that will make PlanetPlanet be a perfect choice for Mozilla Community Site planet.
• MCS admin panel. Admin panel will allow for an easy installation and customization of the web tools with features like Single Sign On and OpenID.

• What's next? - List of ideas or topics that could be useful for this project.

Technologies

• Most of the technologies use PHP because that is what chosen web tools use.
• Requirements for a platform are: PHP5/Mysql5.
• OpenID support should be provided for each web tool.
• Single Sign On should work between webtools used for one website.
• CSSLib - CSS optimization library.

Development model

The initial development phase is led by Gandalf, and once it reaches a level of stability it will be open sourced and community will be offered a chance to use any part of the system and upstream their modifications. Once upstreamed modifications should help other communities and the system should procude a normal open source model of development.

Licensing

• All images are covered by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike except of trademark signs and logos.
• All code is covered by Mozilla Public License
• Use of the theme is covered by Licensing Guidelines