The LW1.0 was a fork of the Reddit codebase, I assume because it was available and had many of the desired features. I wasn’t there for the decision to build LW2.0 as a new Forum, but I imagine doing so allowed for a lot more freedom to build a forum that served the desired purpose in many ways.
how ForumMagnum is really developed
Something in your framing feels a bit off. Think of “ForumMagnum” as an engine and LessWrong, EA Forum as cars. We’re the business of “building and selling cars”, not engines. LW and EA Forum are sufficiently similar to use the same the engine, but there aren’t Forum Magnum developers, just “LW developers” and “EAF developers”. You can back out an abstracted Forum Magnum philosophy, but it’s kind of secondary/derived from the object level forums. I suppose my point is against treating it as too primary.
there aren’t Forum Magnum developers, just “LW developers” and “EAF developers”.
Could you please expand on this? How is the codebase organized: is all code shared, or are there separate plugins for individual websites? How do “LW developers” and “EAF developers” coordinate when they want to make changes in the shared code?
There’s a single codebase. It’s React and the site is composed out of “components”. Most components are shared but can have some switching logic within them changes behavior. For some things e.g. frontpage, each site has its own customized component. There are different “style sheets” / “themes” for each them. When you run in instance for Forum Magnum, you tell it whether it’s a LW instance, EA Forum instance, etc. and it will run as the selected kind of site.
Coordination happens via Slack, GitHub, and a number of meetings (usually over Zoom/Tuple). Many changes get “forum-gated” so they only apply to one site.
The LW1.0 was a fork of the Reddit codebase, I assume because it was available and had many of the desired features. I wasn’t there for the decision to build LW2.0 as a new Forum, but I imagine doing so allowed for a lot more freedom to build a forum that served the desired purpose in many ways.
Something in your framing feels a bit off. Think of “ForumMagnum” as an engine and LessWrong, EA Forum as cars. We’re the business of “building and selling cars”, not engines. LW and EA Forum are sufficiently similar to use the same the engine, but there aren’t Forum Magnum developers, just “LW developers” and “EAF developers”. You can back out an abstracted Forum Magnum philosophy, but it’s kind of secondary/derived from the object level forums. I suppose my point is against treating it as too primary.
Could you please expand on this? How is the codebase organized: is all code shared, or are there separate plugins for individual websites? How do “LW developers” and “EAF developers” coordinate when they want to make changes in the shared code?
There’s a single codebase. It’s React and the site is composed out of “components”. Most components are shared but can have some switching logic within them changes behavior. For some things e.g. frontpage, each site has its own customized component. There are different “style sheets” / “themes” for each them. When you run in instance for Forum Magnum, you tell it whether it’s a LW instance, EA Forum instance, etc. and it will run as the selected kind of site.
Coordination happens via Slack, GitHub, and a number of meetings (usually over Zoom/Tuple). Many changes get “forum-gated” so they only apply to one site.