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.
Get In Touch
If you are running a local Mozilla community site or are interested in local Mozilla community sites, please join the discussion.
- Mailing list: Subscribe to community-local-sites
Members
- David Boswell: Lead Contributor Engagement Staff
- Soumya Deb: Developer-engagement Volunteer
- Leo McArdle: Contributor-engagement Volunteer
- Paul Booker Drupal Developer & Ubuntu administrator Volunteer (Sponsored by Ian Hayward @ Appcoast)
[Feel free to add yourself, if you're upto it...]
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:
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| Domains | to help get a domain for a community website |
| Hosting | to help set up hosting for a community website |
| Site | overview of MCS and its components |
| Theme | professional, polished theme created for MCS |
| Slide Template | presentation template for slideshows |
| Logo | A logo designed to give a unified feel 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
- 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
After Creating Your Site
After you've created a local Mozilla site, you may be wondering what to do next to build a community around it. Here are some guides and suggestions: