By Anonymous (not verified) on

This is something I've been playing around with today :)

I've wanted to do it for a while and today I knocked out some quick code. The idea is a drupal base collaberation system, I'm envisioning it being sort of a mashup of basecamp, shareflow and google wave. Compared to those the advantages would be:

- Free
- Extensible
- run on your own server
- widely available
- guaranteed to make you look like a drupal pro, rather than a hopping on the bandwagon wave user

I am basing this off my ideas of what I would want as a web developer, which is something along the lines of basecamp but with the ability to add more features, and with a fancier message system ala zenbe shareflow or google wave. Now, of course I realize you can do something along these lines with contributed modules (hence, the whole rockclimbr thing), but I think that's somewhat less than ideal. The time it would take a seasoned drupal pro to get all the contributed modules set up and things nicely themed would be not insignificant, not to mention the terror it may cause a newbie. My thought is that there should be a nice simple system, just a few clicks and then it just works. You don't have to download tons of modules, create and style views, etc. Just one thing, install and you are done.

So far, here is what I have: http://screencast.com/t/dem8AFt7yUp

Just a quick screencast of the demo. Obviously it's not very styled yet, but it's a start. It requires no contributed modules so far, although for the file uploading you need upload module enabled. Everything is a node, files are node attachments. Other modules could extend the node types, if I get fancy I could put in views support so you could even switch to using views if you wanted. The goal is a sane, sensible bit of functionality out of the box with support for 3rd party modules to add on to it. Beyond the messaging component (which will need filters, say for images, files, etc) I'd like to add some basecamp style features like milestones and task lists.

So, would you use it? Thoughts? Suggestions?

Comments

David Naian’s picture

David Naian commented

First impression after seen the screencast: Looks really simple and fast, Nice.!!
I'm someone working to get the Basecamp clone (Rockclimb version) updated. I agree with you that there are to much modules and the test site I have is really slow.
Anyway there are also some others trying to get this Clone project done! (see http://drupal.org/node/622604 )

ripspinner’s picture

ripspinner commented

I'm very interested in your project and wonder when it will be available to the public. I have been looking at various collaborative solutions on the net including shareflow,etherpad, google wave (which is dead), and other business solutions.

What I have in mind for my site is group collaboration to work on projects and share via real time my full idea is quite extensive and I have only seen one thing similar on the web, I have a developer site meant as a portal to teach object oriented languages. On the back end is going to be a portal to sell projects, that have graduated to a level that is professional, with members of the group that developed the project sharing the profits.

What I in-vision is a web based IDE that allows collaborative work that uses a SVN based on a cloud service, and also a cloud service virtual machine environment for compiling projects and testing on various platforms, all with real time collaborative networking. This hasn't been done fully in a pure web based environment and would require pulling together a lot of ideas into a cohesive framework. What's unique about this is a real time collaborative integration with an SVN. An isolated virtual machine that could be spawned on a cloud service for isolated specific group compilation and testing of projects.

In the mean time it's best to start "simple" with existing solutions and ideas.