One step migration from stackexchange to askbot using google app engine

Again, the same golden principle, the more user your have, the better the product. If I were you, I might try really hard to get my initial users... Once you have 1000 websites using askbot, you don't need to worry about other stuff...

Then, I might work on making the installation easier. For early adopters, more function doesn't help. Easy of use will make it stand out.

I have a great idea:

If you can make a google app in the google app gallery: http://appgallery.appspot.com/. Then people will only need to click several times to do the migration... But it is free and has python and Django ...

Man. I am really excited about this idea now...

Correction: unlike iphone apps, it is not that straightforward to deploy a google apps at google engine :( ...

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Evgeny

updated 2010-04-05 14:26:22 -0600

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DealsVistaCom

asked 2010-04-05 12:59:20 -0600

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as for migration from SE, well hopefully people will chose to migrate because they like our software - that's where some good work on our part will be handy :).

Evgeny (2010-04-05 15:44:09 -0600) edit

I will choose to migrate with the easiest path... Most of the stackexchange sites are small and are not technically capable of setting askbot.org up

DealsVistaCom (2010-04-05 20:30:18 -0600) edit

good point

Evgeny (2010-04-05 20:56:32 -0600) edit

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Hey, thanks for the advice!

I agree that offering this application on App Engine would be super cool in many ways and I bet that somebody will do it sooner or later with a similar project.

Speaking for myself personally - I want to focus right now on making the UI better. Would you like to jump on our boat and start a GAE branch?

The guiding principle here should be that DB backend must be easily switchable without rewrites of view functions and anything else (except the DB accessors) so that we could merge the branches easily. That may require rewriting the views and the DB API once to accommodate later changes, but I don't know anything about GAE yet (could somebody else fill in?)

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Evgeny

updated 2010-04-05 14:32:47 -0600, answered 2010-04-05 14:12:41 -0600

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I too have no idea about GAE but it would be *so* cool to get Askbot running on it, especially seeing as affordable Python hosting is not that widespread.

Pekka (2010-05-03 10:49:54 -0600) edit

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In my opinion, the current UI is good enough for now.

Let us put it this way: - a user, not a website admin, will like a website because of the ui - a website admin, given two product, one is bug-less with regular ui design, the other is full of bugs with fancy ui design, he will pick the bug-less one with regular ui design. A lot of website admins do very hard core modification to change the ui anyway, no matter how fancy the default ui is...

I thought right now, the main focus of askbot.org is to convince website admins to use the product, not end users ....

User experience doesn't equal to UI. I thought you want to improve the user experience as a whole, not the UI alone. Given limited resources, the priority is your take ...Personally, in my project, I spent way too much time on the UI part of the project and I really regretted it... It is so hard to go from a 80% perfect UI to a 90% perfect UI ...

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DealsVistaCom

answered 2010-04-05 20:28:43 -0600

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Oh, I actually mean some quite limited changes in the user interface - all doable within a week. You have a very good point about the importance of migration and the ease of installation. I plan to modularlize and document templates so that they could be customized more easily too.

Evgeny (2010-04-05 20:59:47 -0600) edit

yes, the last 10% will take most of your time.

Evgeny (2010-04-05 21:07:02 -0600) edit

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One step migration from stackexchange to askbot using google app engine edit

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One step migration from stackexchange to askbot using google app engine