SourceForge.net provides a valuable service to the Open Source community, but its implementation and user interface could be improved in many ways. (TavisRudd in WebwareSourceforge)
The biggest improvement would be to get the browser out of the way. I cringe every time I need to search a mailing list (or worse, a Sourceforge "forum") for a specific keyword or conversation through some strange web-interface. IMAP, which was designed for exactly that purpose, does the job thousands of times faster with far less drain on both human and computer/network resources. (NNTP is also ok, but requires the client software to do the searching, thus causing more load on the server by having to transfer all of the articles, rather than just the interesting ones.)
I think that a key benefit of the webware approach over the Zope approach is that you can design your application without being constrained by a browser. Roundup's design is a good example of this. It uses the most approriate protocol/tool for each task, instead of trying to shoehorn everything into "stateless" HTTP transactions.
Therefore: a "webware application" such as this proposed collaboration suite, should be first an application with a thin adapter to create a browser-based UI generated using webware components.
Please read these before you start:
And beware of this (another "feature" of the current sourceforge development model):
(Can you tell that I strongly dislike web-only interfaces? 8-D)
-- TerrelShumway - 16 Apr 2002