Yesterday, September 14th, Firefox announced its 1.0 Preview Release. To celebrate that and to make the most out of the momentum Firefox has gained the last months, a new initiative was launched: Spread Firefox. Drupal users will immediately see that this initiative is built on top of Drupal. In fact is is built on top of CivicSpace, a distribution and service built with Drupal software and aimed at grassroots campaigning on internet.
Spread Firefox already has 1300+ registered users (according to the numbers in the user lists) and has received a lot of media attention the past few days. So this might turn out to be another example of Drupal's capability to serve all sorts of sites and communities. But also as a great example of how well CivicSpace is suited for grassroots campaigning.
Spread Firefox has one of Drupal's unique features: Drupal's distributed authentication. This means you can log in with your drupal ID on Spread Firefox and that people from Spread Firefox can use their ID to log on to Drupal.org or any other Drupal site with this feature.
Comments
Distributed Authentication
Thanks for enabling the DA, I've got to admit that is probably one of Drupal's killer features. Imagine never having to register again at a vBul or phpBB forum again.
Goodluck with the new site and it's growing community!
Yes, but...
There is a big problem with currently used DA: every site on which you want to authenticate gets to know your password. This is rather ugly.
It would be much nicer, if one would give the "foreign" site only the name of the "home" site, rather than the password. (Home=the site on which I have an account, foreign=any other site)
From there on, it's pretty much what Liberty alliance does: foreign site contacts the home site, and the home site returns back the login name, or possibly even an xml file containing login name and any other info it wants to share (like photo, real name etc.). For security, the user data could be signed by home site private key.
Can we learn from SpreadFirefox?
I wonder if we can learn from this site to help spread the Drupal word.
In what way?
In what way where you thinking to learn from that Dries? Their way of marketing, and if we can use some parts of it on drupal.org?
Or were you thinking more in lines of 'using these kind of big Drupal installations to put Drupal into the spotlights'?
[Ber | webschuur.com]
Marketing
From their marketing approach, that is.
Reward system et al.
I am not too sure if having a reward system is a good idea for all Open Source systems. In big communities, like firefox's, it indeed is a good idea. Because in their situation the rate developer/user is very high. In our (drupal.org) case that rate is a lot lower, because drupal.org users are in fact Drupal adminstrators. Real users of drupal, are those who visit those sites. The ones that set up a drupal service are not really users but administrators, so in our case we would be tagetting them, rather then the end-users.
That said, I do not think a reward system would work. Because of the fact that developers and adminstrators are often the same people on drupal.org. Thus a reward system would only benefit those who are involved as much as they can, anyway. But if we want to attract more adminstrators, we should be less technical on our "front-door". I hear very often that newbies are overwhelmed by all the information drupal.org contains. Other CMSes simply often have less information (a bad thing), but also organise it a bit better to keep it "away" from newbies. New potential users want to know: what does drupal looks like (not only screenshots from the bluemarine), what can it do for him/her, and wat has been done with it. We have all that: image galleries, /sites and the handbook with general information. It is even directly linked to, on the frontpage. I do not know how we could present it even better than we do now, maybe make a different page as frontpage (not /node)? One that displays latest headlines as list, and a few boxes with a screenshot (we definately need something graphical on the frontpage) a box with short wat drupal is about (the text from the leaflet) and some top drupal sites, possibly with screenshots?
Besides that reward system, firefox hasgained a lot of new users through little get-firefox buttons on a lot of websites. We could do this very easily by adding a standard footer in the database template files. Or by adding a standard block with credits in it.
But even more effective could it be to allow adminstrators to set a default help page about drupal on their own website. Something like http://foo.bar/drupal/ that will show a short story about drupal on each and every drupal website, might be a good thing. Of course this should be opt-in. So default that page is hidden, but if people want it, they can turn it on.
Another thing is extending the drupal sites page. We could add a rating there: most popular sites first. popularity is rated trough clickstrough. We should monitor that in the database similar to the way weblinks does it now.
I was not talking about their
I was not talking about their reward system, more about how they organize and discuss Firefox marketing.
I'm not sure if they were ready for the onslaught
Love that spreadfirefox site design. It seems the site might be down... on another note, i installed civicspace last night and its a really nice package.
I think the onslought has been dealt with well
The onslaught shows extremely well how scalable Drupal in fact is. ITs small footprint, advanced caching and bootstraps prove to work.
Indeed, SpreadFirefox is a slow, if not down now and then. But all seems to shape up well now that things have been running a few days. I am not involved, but I can imagine that for example their reward banner system is very straining. I have no iea about clicks, but would't be surprised if that system takes the shape of a DOS attack. With already 5000+ registered users, each having approx 1 of those buttuns that would mean thousands of redirects per hour. There are drupal sites out there with ten times that userbase, but I bet none of them reached that amount in a few days, I bet.
I cannot think of a system that would at least withstand that fire as well as Drupal (CivicSpace) has proven to do here.
[Ber | webschuur.com]
I'm in touch with them, and y
I'm in touch with them, and yes, the reward system turned out to be a performance bottleneck. This problem was fixed by optimizing the reward system's SQL queries. I believe the site has been running smooth ever since.
Can they contribute their theme to Drupal?
One has to say that the theme on SpreadFireFox is really simple and nice at the same time. The choice of colors and fonts make it look good, and remain functional too.
I also noticed that it is phptemplate based.
Can we ask them to contribute their themes, and make them a standard theme shipped with the official Drupal distribution?
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Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba
It would be wonderful if they
It would be wonderful if they contributed their theme. I would love to use it for the Civicspace install I'm getting ready to set up for my site.
It will be
That theme will be cleaned up a bit and included in the CivicSpace distribution as soon as possible. Chris Messina, CivicSpace's UI guy made it. He will be working at CivicSpace Labs full time soon. He has made other nice looking themes too....
like
http://www.ob4.org
And the Democratica template seen here:
http://baobabs.org/muohio/
Please contribute it to the base Drupal
Can you please ask him to spend some extra hours on it and make sure it is contributed back to the base Drupal themes?
That would be really great, and we will all thank both of you for it.
--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba
As long as it looks like what
As long as it looks like what Spread Firefox currently has, that will be a thrilling development. Any idea on an ETA for the next big Civicspace release?
More importantly, any idea when the theme will be available? If we had more of a sense of whether it's a matter of days or months it would be easier to adjust accordingly.
If there is anything the spreadfirefox project proves it's that timely and well disseminated information can have hugely succesful results...
eta 2 weeks on the theme
it could be delayed or it could be quite a bit earlier. if you want the theme earlier shoot me a mail - (zack at civicspacelabs.org) and I will see what I can do.
yup agreed.
yup agreed.
more users!
and from this posting:
So that would fill up thei userbase and would make it the fastest growing drupal site for sure. Which would mean a good show case of the power of drupal and a testcase to stress / test the limits.
--
groets
bertb
--
groets
bert boerland
Theme, SFX Users
Hey guys. Great to see this conversation going on... We could actually use some Drupal help over at SFX, so if you're interested, toss me an email!
As you can tell from the site, we have over 22,500 users. And the site is whistling along... Fantastic!
As for the theme... I'd love to spend some time making it available through CivicSpace... But it probably won't happen until November when I go full time for CivicSpace. Anyway, it is on my list, so keep your eye on CivicSpaceLabs.org!
SpreadFirfox in the current issue of Wired
SpreadFirefox and Chris Messina got a nice mention in the current issue of Wired(13.02). The cover article is "The Firefox Revolt" and the passage occurs on pg. 94 - congrats' to all those behind the scene.