Welcome OStatic
Sorry folks for not getting out a full blog entry today but the project I have alluded to on a couple of occasions has launched. OStatic is a site dedicated to all things Open Source. There are fantastic writers for news content and editorials, over 150,000 software projects, wiki editable project descriptions, questions, project alternatives, project reviews, and more. Give it a whirl and contribute a review or alternative to those Open Source projects that support your work on a daily basis!
OStatic really has a ton of content at launch. Looks great.
Eric
Great visual pop and top notch layout. Nice work.
Geof Harries
@ Eric: yes, a lot of effort when into data wrangling before the site was launched. Now it is up to the users to generate useful metadata for projects and up to us to continue to develop useful tools for the Open Source community (a LOT is in the works here).
@ Geof: thank you sir! It was a challenging process to get all of the information on the pages to be meaningful and polish the experience without overwhelming and posing a negative effect on its useability.
Jeremy
that site looks outstanding! have you considered modifying the theme to make it a gpl’d drupal theme release? the community really needs more great themes like this…
dave
@ Dave: thank you sir. Actually I provided html templates, css and javascript for the OStatic interface and managed to avoid messing with the Drupal Templates. We are discussing however how we can give back to the Drupal community by sharing code were relevant and writing a series of articles to describe our process.
Jeremy Koempel
So the development of OStatic didn’t involve creating a custom Drupal theme? How did you “avoid messing with the Drupal Templates” as you say? I’d love to know a bit more about how you created such a clean, functional, Drupal-based site. A series of articles would be great, but some general comments would be very much appreciated by myself and the community.
Paul
@Paul: Hello. Actually what I meant by my comment about not messing with the Drupal Templates was that my role in the project was such that our developers would take my html/css/javascript and integrate it into the Drupal framework. From what I understand there was a fair amount of hacking around the templates to create what you see on the OStatic site. Here is a link to a thread in the Drupal forum that one of our top developer participated in and sheds some light on the process: http://drupal.org/node/229955
Jeremy Koempel
I know it doesn’t compare with Ostatic (which has the support of the GigaOm network) but http://www.mytestbox.com launched 2 weeks before Ostatic.
While Ostatic is specialized in open-source MyTestBox specializes in web software reviews, news, tips & tricks (web software which is open source or not).
Mircea