Hey buddies...

Since some of us are members of YC forums for years and sadly I have to say that some of our most active members are gone, I think that we should go back to old days and remind ourselves of the projects and stuff we've been doing together...

Now, since we are not that young anymore , most of us are working for someone or having a company, I was thinking that we should merge and open some kind of open source web developing studio and design some kind of free themes etc.

Idea is basically simple... Anyone can hop in with certain coding/designing skills... Firstly we would have to design and code a unique web style (for some already made CMS as it is joomla, e107 etc) or along with design, code a new CMS (that would take us much more time for sure).

It would be some kind of non-profit organization but our goal be to design some cool themes and even if you're not making money designing them, you would still have a ton of it to put in your own portfolio.

I'm pretty sure adding a donation link to it would at least cover some web-space/bandwidth costs so why not...

I remember that YC community was providing free domain and web space for some "let's do it together" projects...

Not sure if it is still out...

Think about this and comment it.
hyper

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I think this would be interesting. (Shall we try another project?)

I coded YoungCMS with a lot of help from our senior members. I've been wanting to put it online for some time now, since YC Labs has long since gone. So, I imported everything into Bazaar (since Subversion seems so 2005) and put it up on Launchpad.

If you're interested in fooling around with the CMS, go for it!

https://launchpad.net/youngcms/

This could be good in a way, because I spend quite a long time coding the "new backend", which would make it much easier to develop new features (or even make old ones better). But after all that coding, I only managed to use this new backend to get all the previous features back. Now maybe it could be put to better use. (I still learned a lot while making that).

I could help anyone interested get used to the structure and do a bit of "showing you around" kind of thing, if required, but I won't be able to contribute for some time, I'm way too busy.

YCMS is also completely themable.

I don't think we should look at donations or any such thing. Launchpad is really good for most developing kind of stuff. It also has FAQs, which we can almost use as a Wiki. If that doesn't work, then host it on Google Code also, where you can say code hosted and issues tracked externally and use only their Wiki.

Still, I'm sure we've code some other YC code lying around, and I'm sure we could start those other projects also. I just commented on YCMS because I know so much about it.

I would suggest working on building a platform, too many CMS projects end up trying to build too much into the core build and over complicate the experience and also end up producing a terrible CMS: Joomla, Typo3, Drupal etc

A platform like? Not sure what exactly you mean...

Platform/engine, write the core but provide the ability for developers to write layers on top of the CMS easily.

I just got a related idea, tell me what you think of it.

Make a super flexible version of a CMS (it won't really be a CMS). Something more of an extremely easy and extendable interface to databases that breaks away from the concept of databases being tables (at least on the front-end) Somewhat like this:

Let's say I'm working in a large conservation sanctuary and I want to document all the species that I know in the sanctuary. I have a hosting account and install this software on it.

I'm now asked about the structure of the website. Using an easy web interface, I should be able to design the structure without being extremely tech-savvy.

So I say that my website is classified into types of documentations (so my homepage will display these categories). E.g mammals, reptiles, birds, trees, shrubs, amphibians, insects, etc. Since each of these different types of species have different "fields" (like we call it) that are important to them, we cannot have the same "table" structure for each of them.

I should now be able to enter structures for each of these types, optimize which fields are important, how each can be searched for, etc. These types can also have broader categories which will allow me to have some common fields/properties of each species (all living things have a common name, kingdom, genus, species, etc).

Once the setup is done, I can now start entering data, changing the theme, etc.

This software should also be easy to extend. If I want to make a website for a tourism company, it should be easy for me to change the way it functions to make it a website that has information about the company, its packages, etc.

The clear downside I can see to this is that for this to be good, it requires fresh interface ideas more than innovative coding. But doing that might be just as interesting....