I could go either way between a gallery or a project manager. Gallery would take less work and this means we could spend a lot more effort refining it than the amount of features I can think of to put in a project manager - therefore I'm leaning toward a gallery script.

As for roles in the project I've got some fairly good frontend coding experience - tableless CSS-based layouts all the way :) I'd rather use jQuery for any JS we use but that can be argued later :)

Why even bother to support something unsupported ;) ?

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As it appears the discussion regarding coding style is coming to a close, what you need to decide now is what you are going to do for the project. General consensus would appear to be a gallery or a project manager. I would go on to IRC and decide on this asap, nothing can go forward without it.

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Im in the channel so I'm ready for some hard discussion :)

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Nunchaku! Who doesn't like martial arts? =)

i can't at the moment, im at work but i will join the channel when i get home.

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Just a few tips.
Someone should be a "project leader", putting together a list of people who can help, and what they should do. Ofcourse everyone is at different levels of coding, but I think it will be solved as we progress through the project.

Also, you should (obviously) deside what to do. A gallery, a project manager, or CMS, or w.e you want. And then also compile a list of possible features.

These are just some suggestions that I could think of right now.
I'd be more than happy to help out with coding! I have a summerbreak so.. ^_^

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I agree with the project manager bit. Things can get extremely out of control if not properly managed.

I love the game idea, but if we are to create an open source game, the game should be incredibly flexible. Everything down to the Tee should be customizable and changeable, making no two instances seem the same.

Something as simple as a strategy turned based game all the way up to a RPG.

Also, My vote is in for Object oriented programming standards!!

If you do go forward on a game, make sure you have someone who knows a lot about speed and load optimization for large scale applications. Honestly, I think that project is above both the average skill here and our budget ($0).

We are not professionals with a large budget so professional projects are out of the question. We don't have a full time staff, and half the staff aren't even experts in their field. To top all that off, we don't have a solid base of management. I don't like to sound like a pessimist, but I would rather see a smaller project stated and completed than a large project dumped because issues came down the road. If our endeavors go to a CMS or game, I don't see even a possibility of it being completed and being worth using.

edit:
To elaborate further on my reasons
There are only a few programmers on this forum who might have the skills to compete a CMS or game. Furthermore it would probably take more than a year to go from where we are now to release. Morale will go down and both management and labor will loose sight of where we where headed in the first place.

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Yup... and mostly due to the fact that not many are actually deadicated. We only need but a few, but those few are hard to come by. The 'in and outer' people will come and go, but the dedicated must remain.

Morale will also keep going down if a certain somebody continually pops in and tells everybody how bad they are at PHP.
-m

Thats why I think we need to know everyones skill into the detail. Some people can just quickly learn new skills, but the beginners will create the simple stuff. (imo)

Lets say if we would use a MCV pattern. The skilled php'ers will create the model, while the amateur (sorry to put it like that) will create the controller under the supervision of the skilled php'ers.

At least that's how I think about it.

And some more news. I'm at work and just told my boss about this little project and i said what projects we are thinking of. He said that if we would create a gallery he might consider sponsoring our work! :)

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Nunchaku! Who doesn't like martial arts? =)

I wasn't directly pointing any of my posts at you, but would you say you have the skills to build a quality CMS?

I am trying to help steer this project toward success, one of the ways is getting a reality check on the ability of all team members (real companies do this) and what everyone can accomplish.Going into something too big is a sure fire way to fail. And for what its worth, I wouldnt classify myself as one of the people able to create a game here, mainly due to speed issues and maintaining a massive architecture.

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I agree, we need to know what people's skill levels are otherwise it will fail.
I for one have never created a game with PHP and i feel i wouldn't be able to lend much time in the way of maintaining a massive code-base. An image gallery on the other hand is relatively simple (depending ofc on what features you want) and compaired to a game has a smaller code-base and less of an issue with speed.

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I wasn't worried that you were pointing your posts at me. I'm comfortable with my skill level, and more over, I haven't volunteered for this project, as I have far too many things going on to be able to commit a fair amount of time to everybody else here.

How does one get better at something? If you were a mountain climber, and all you ever did was the easy wall at the gym, would you improve? If you were a new snowboarder, and you conquered the bunny hill, do you stay there? The variety of ability and experience here probably varies quite a bit, but what better way for anybody, including the skilled, to learn? Let them do what they want to do, no matter what you think they can do. It's great that everybody here wants to make it so professional of a project, but nobody's getting paid, so they might as well have some fun with it. If that means absolutely nothing ever gets finished, who cares? Learn. Have fun.
-m

A more correct analogy would be if you where a mountain climber who has never left the gym, would you climb mount everest? A CMS could take a year to make with a team our size, I think it would be better for everyone if we did something we could finish. That would be more valuable (and fun) than an unfinished CMS or game would ever be. An image gallery sounds like that. If it is the general concensus of the group that my advice on how to do a project is not wanted, I will stop. But until then, I will do what I can to steer the project in a realistic direction.

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I Agree with Village Idiot. A project that will take a year can be damn fun, but do see something coming together in just a few months will be much more fun. Of course with this I don't say I think we should make some small little 50% working script, but an image gallery with plugin support with this number is reasonable to achieve in a few months.

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Nunchaku! Who doesn't like martial arts? =)

I'm not trying to say your advice isn't wanted, nor that it was bad, and I apologize if I made that insinuation. All I'm trying to say is that I think with the combined efforts of those already involved and the fact that they're all coming from this community which is in of itself a solid resource for the members of the project to seek further help (via the same methods we all use to look for help here), the possibility for them to do a large project is just as viable as a smaller one.

On that note, I wouldn't expect a game to be the best idea either, considering the realm of online games is something best left to other technologies (primarily being Flash and Actionscript I would think). As for CMS' and frameworks, it goes back to the why recreate the wheel analogy that's previously been offered up. I put in my support for the image gallery way back when, and I'd offer another outsider vote for that again. I went looking for one months back for a side project and came to a dead end on finding anything that fell into the realm of usability and functionality, so if that project got pulled off I'm sure it could garner a lot of attention.
-m

Sorry for the miscommunication.

Partially true, but it takes experience to do a good job on a large application. Knowledge is required for experience (and can be learned from a book), but experience can only be learned though time and practice. When I define competence, I look at both. That is why I say I couldn't manage a CMS, because I have no experience in managing applications that are large enough to crash a server.

Fair enough.

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Oh c'mon now. I crashed my server twice within the first month of coding, I'm sure we all could if we put our minds to it, and I definitely think that's a good idea for a major project. We'll develop a new PHP internet worm.
-m

lol.

As funny as it would be to get members off of our (alleged) part in crashing half the European infrastructure, no.

Back on topic:
Lets get the decision rolling with that script we are going to do.

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