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

Widgets graphics (Stats) should be on front page of project page Ex: look at https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/widgets for "Commit Activity Timeline" and "Active Contributors". This should be here: https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/ along with total contributors.

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

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

Stacks

Ohloh lets users add FOSS projects to their "stack".
https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/stacks

Map

There is a nice map:
https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/map

Number of contributors/commits

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

http://cia.vc/stats/project/tikiwiki total commits: 39891

Another example:

• User stats between Ohloh (510), CIA (1715) and and Tiki's commit counter (1157) are not vastly different.

• Project stats don't report same number of commits:
  • http://cia.vc/stats/project/tikiwiki
  • https://www.ohloh.net/p/tikiwiki/commits

    
    

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/forums/3491/topics/6043
https://www.ohloh.net/forums/8/topics/385
https://www.ohloh.net/posts?page=2&q=branches+enlistments&sort=newest
Yet, in Tiki, with a new version (and thus new branch) every 6 months, there is a lot of activity. ex.: Perhaps more commits in 7.x than trunk

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:

1. it should indicate the total number of contributors
2. 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

Sorting and filtering

• More useful sorting & filtering of projects: 3 suggestions

Comparing projects

• https://www.ohloh.net/p/compare is very nice
  • 3 projects limit is too few. Should be like 10 or 20
  • A URL to the comparison should exist (like tags now, where a common URL is available for comparing project A,B,C and C,B,A)

https://www.ohloh.net/tags/php/mysql is automatically redirected to https://www.ohloh.net/tags/mysql/php so we can have a canonical URL.

Similary, we should have:
https://www.ohloh.net/compare/tikiwiki/typo3/plone

Instead of:
https://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?project_0=Plone&project_1=Tiki+Wiki+CMS+Groupware&project_2=TYPO3

Total number of contributors

• 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?

Related links

http://alternativeto.net/