

Ask HN: Are open-source websites possible/practical? - rfurmani

Suppose one has an idea for a web service that is universally beneficial and will make the world a better place.  There is lots that can be done and myriad directions to go in, but it should be completely free (modulo hosting costs, that can be covered) and best run by volunteers.
For regular code open-source is great, but how about extending this to the full design and development of a website.  Design, front-end, back-end all submitted by regular people.
Is this plausible, and how would you see it happening?  Would it be better to use Rails or Django or what?  Either way anyone could fork/clone the project and run it for free on Heroku/AppEngine (with test data) and then submit changes to the main project.
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namank
AS long as you set a couple of APIs to account for security and
standardization across the site, I don't see why not.

Also, someone has to be the Gatekeeper to push code to production.

That's essentially what Wordpress plugins are, its all open source.

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Tichy
Doesn't Wikipedia work like that?

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rfurmani
With Wikipedia you can update the main text content, but there is no direct
access to the backend or even to the templates/css/etc. Unless you meant
MediaWiki being open source? That's an interesting datapoint. Do you know how
quickly MediaWiki changes are pushed out to wikipedia? (Also, the idea I had
in mind is more suited for a single host, rather than some software that would
be beneficial to host on many different sites)

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ig1
All of Wikipedia is developed using an open source model

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rfurmani
Okay my bad, that looks very much like what I was asking for. I'm still
wondering about the language, PHP might not be ideal :)

Thanks.

