We love Ohloh

Our project page is https://www.ohloh.net/projects/tikiwiki

You can think of Ohloh as a Wikipedia-like database of all FOSS projects.

Below are some notes about Ohloh and some suggestions to make it even better. This is very specific to the Tiki project and not meant to be a list of most important things for Ohloh or other projects.

General project presentation

https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki

Tags are very cool. Very well done to find/compare/etc.
Google Map of users & contributors: excellent
Related Projects by Tags : excellent
Incoming RSS feed: excellent

Factoids

This is a cool idea.
https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/factoids

In general

• Great that the word contributor is used instead of developers. Great that people can share on how they help a project (documentation, etc.)

Widgets

cool!
https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/widgets

And even more with this nice change

Project cost indicator

347 Person Years
19 million dollars!

https://www.ohloh.net/forums/10/topics/472

Number of contributors/commits

These numbers don't correspond to ours (And we know we are not counting everything)

Another example:

• Stats between Ohloh and CIA are not consistent.

Ref: https://www.ohloh.net/forums/10/topics/472

This is likely due to the fact that branches contributions are not counted:
https://www.ohloh.net/posts?page=2&q=branches+enlistments&sort=newest
Yes, in Tiki, with a new version (and thus new branch) every 6 months, there is a lot of activity.

What about Smarty?

We use Smarty

Sorting

Projects are sortable by Downloads, Newest, Users, Followers, Rating & Journals

Number of contributors is at least as important a stats.

Also, when filtering by tag, the sorting by number of contributors would be welcome as well.

Tags

Use of tags on Ohloh is excellent, especially to find related projects.

However, as is often the case with tags, there are duplicates like zend_framework and zendframework.

Would there be a way to have tag aliases or to have a form to suggest the merge of two tags?

• Tags are messy with all the synonyms, and underscores, squished words.
  • wiki wiki_wiki wikiwiki wiki_engine, wikiengine
    • Auto-complete helps a bit but we need a way to merge tags. Perhaps some makes a list of recommended synonyms, and once someone else approves, all tags are merged.
      • A bit like the username aliases already managed by Ohloh

Feeds

Badge

Widgets

• widgets

Sorting and filtering

• More useful sorting & filtering of projects: 3 suggestions

Other Suggestions

• The widget shows the total number of lines of code and the total value of the project, so why not show the total number of contributors?
• https://www.ohloh.net/p/compare is very nice
  • The default should be activity or contributors (not lines of code)
  • 3 projects limit is too few. Should be like 10 or 20
• Widgets graphics (Stats and Factoids) should be on front page of project page Ex: https://www.ohloh.net/p/ispconfig/widgets

Related links

http://alternativeto.net/