Ardour web presence: developer wanted

Ardour is an open source application for recording, editing and music music & sound for Linux, OS X and Windows. The project started over 16 years ago, and has seen contributions from more than 70 programmers. It recently reached its 5.0 release milestone. It generates sufficient revenue to pay its lead developer a reasonable salary, as well as covering all costs associated with its network presence.

The Ardour project currently needs a small number of small/medium web-related tasks to improve the web experience associated with the application's user community. Although the lead developer also functions as primary web administrator, and has sufficient web development skills to accomplish these tasks, this increasingly seems time inefficient. We have some compensation available for the work (amount(s) to be negotiated).

Ardour currently uses 5 independent web sites:

ardour.org
static site
manual.ardour.org
static site
community.ardour.org
Drupal dynamic site mostly for forums, articles with comment threads, and payment logic/processing.
tracker.ardour.org
Mantis bug tracker
nightly.ardour.org
hand-coded semi-static site

The work to be done mostly concerns community.ardour.org, so the person who undertakes the work should have some reasonable understanding of both PHP and Drupal, even if ultimately other web technologies are chosen.

The specific tasks that need to be done are outlined below. We suspect that it is most likely that someone would tackle one of these tasks at one time (they are mostly, though not entirely independent).

  • Modernize forum (https://github.com/discourse/discourse or similar), keep existing posts and comments (currently drupal)
  • Share user credentials and permissions across all sites: payment, forum, bug-tracker, download, nightly
  • Migrate existing user-database (currently drupal salted md5 hash) to whatever it'll be.
  • Integrate new(er) online payment toolkits into our existing models.
  • (optionally) Update the bug-tracker

If you are interested in tackling one of more of these tasks, please get in touch with paul@linuxaudiosystems.com including an indication of your technical background and estimated compensation level. Ideally we'd like someone who cares about Ardour as much as we do, but fundamentally, the work just needs to get done.

Feel free to post this announcement in any appropriate places.

But why such a mix of technologies?

For a comprehensive solution on php you can take symfony framework, and find or implement all of necessary bundles: forum, bug tracker, payment systems, blog, documentation, static pages and other.

So will a single system of authentication and authorization, unified permissions, one code. It possible to use as one instance of application on different physical servers that will take the information from a single database or replication.

The same rules of choice of technology can be applied to other such as: ROR, Django,etc.

Or you can self create new framework,but this way is very long. (I know about it, three years ago I created CMF).

Can I help you? Maybe. I have good skills in php, sql, javascript.

I’m still reviewing email sent to paul@linuxaudiosystems.com, so feel free to drop me an email there. I don’t believe that there is a single framework that does everything we need. In particular, Ardour’s EXTREMELY unique payment system does not lend itself to most prebuilt methods of dealing with this. There is also a significant level of pain in switching things like bug trackers, and there’s very little reason to reimplement the static site or nightly.ardour.org.

After more than 27 years as a professional programmer, I am extremely skeptical of any claims that a single piece of technology can solve such multi-faceted issues as we face running *.ardour.org. I am willing to be convinced, however. I have attachment to PHP in particular, but anyone who plans to work on some of our existing stuff needs to be able to read and understand what exists already.