I have been avoiding responding here since my opinion is not always welcome. I have been maintaing the oemr.org since October, 2005. I have been the “beneficiary” of numerous armchair quarterbacks who recommended “this_special_software” and “that_favorite_of_mine”. Only to have the helper disappear leaving me to soldier on. The XOOPS page was just such a suggestion. My “expert helper” never did. Brady did help a lot with XOOPS page which was our page documentation tool from 2005-late 2009? At this point we were strongly urged to move from XOOPS to Drupal. There are many of the developers who have skill with Drupal and this seemed to be a reasonable recommendation.
As an intermediary step we installed MediaWiki at openmedsoftware.org and migrated most of the content to the MediaWiki. We were subsequently supposed to start porting this back to Drupal and then swap the XOOPS installation for a Drupal. I am making progress on this and have recently have updated the web server to current, installed a more modern version of PHP and then finally Druoal 7. I am transferring files into the new drupal site. Currently this is at http://www.oemr.org/drupal/ .
I operated the forum on oemr.org for a couple years and had to answer almost all the questions myself. At the time the consensus was to just use the SourceForge forums (this was somewhat self serving because I struggled to answer all the questions myself). We did have some trouble with spammers. I shut down new access to this forum about 3 years ago but the robots still find it and there is still access to these old deprecated pages. However the project has grown a lot. I think the developers get irritated by non-developers asking the same questions repeatedly. The newbies are very intimidated by the highly technical exchanges by the developers. I wish their was a true users forum for real users to talk about how they use OpenEMR instead of “How do I install OpenEMR, I double clicked the program and nothing happened.” There have been repeated requests by a number of developers to have a mail list server for developer discussions.
As an aside - Rod Roark built the original server, it is currently running Centos 5.5, and it has never gone down. What has gone down is the ISP around my office. CentriLink in particular has trouble with electrical power storms in the summer. I have been discussing this with my IT staff about how better to solve the problem. We do have Charter cable in the office and we may switch back over to this server and just use the Centrilink as back up.
If there is interest from the community a oemr.org forum would be relatively easy to set up.
If you don’t get banned from a few forums, or arrested at a few demonstrations, I would never respect your opinion. I personally hope that doesn’t happen to me here, but in my self-appointed role of village pessimist/loudmouth/devil’s Advocate my intentions are sometimes misread, and my attempts at analytical discussion outside of respect for egos may get interpreted as the havering of a egomaniac…when the truth is often that I am just outing my impressions with the honest hope of being solidly refuted and trounced with superior logic (providing a true learning experience and reality check. On that basis, don’t pull any punches with me. My nose is in and ready to be punched with good humor.
As far as “favorite programs”, all I know is that anytime I make a software choice, it’s shortfalls are immediately apparent and I always have some level of regret due to crushed expectations. I can say this (WARNING! Stinking opinions follow!):
1. .asp based forums are out. I use them, and they suck, even though mine runs/looks pretty decent. (Snitz). No-one here would have anything to do with M$ crap anyway.
2. From the drupal demo forum modules I have seen, those look like crap as well and are just not well arranged. The formats are too open to easily differentiate categories and groups. The menus and navigation is cramped, which of course will be no issue to ubergeeks that would rather see the messages via a command-line interface…
3. PHPBB3 is a nice, clean, and visually well sorted interface right out of the box. I have set one up one(1) time, and managed to port a mssql .asp forum database to mysql and then to phpbb3…viola….and I am an idiot.
If Drupal is the way to go by the rights of others, fine by me. Just make it function and look exactly like BB3 and we will have something.
I will be glad to approve your account and expand your privileges.
There are a lot of ways to hook other projects in with drupal and they look native to Drupal. I know this is true of MediaWiki and we are currently moving to a multisite installation of MediaWiki so that the current wiki instead of being at Open Source Medical Software will be a directory of oemr.org. I will check into phpBB and see if this may have already been integrated.
We could go to LDAP to manage users or use OpenID to manage single sign-on so that can both have what we want.
I may or may not use it myself, but OpenID should probably be enabled. On another site, we are integrating several sister sites into one big network, and by requiring openid, we made that much more easily done.
-sorry it took me a while to respond to this. I was too busy playing with the new toy!
