The Microsoft-funded PowerShell community site was launched over the weekend, complete with 501.3c non-profit status and everything. Of course, in reality it’s a joint venture between Microsoft and Sapien, with Don Jones at the helm and Microsoft MVPs as the only other contributors at this point (where “contributors” is loosely put — they’ve made the mistake of not making sure they had lots of content available at launch, so the script repository has things like this one liner … Copy-Item $Profile "$(split-path $profile)profile-backup.$((Get-Date).ToString(’MMddyyHHmmss’))" with a five star rating .
There’s no community quite as easy to build as a commercial junta, I guess. Several major commercial players are on board — even the upstart ShellTools has lent their logo in support. One must assume this will succeed to some degree … especially since Microsoft has been MVP-deputizing all the big PowerShell bloggers who’s support will determine whether this will remain an empty site where these commercial backers can get some extra advertising, or will actually become a true “community” site with active involvement from people without financial incentives .
On the down side, PowerGadgets (among others?) is conspicuously missing, and it remains to be seen if these guys can all play nice with each other. They are, after all, competing in a couple of PowerShell-enhancement spaces, and I haven’t yet seen any sign that any of them are going to shut down their (Microsoft | ShellTools | Sapien) PowerShell forums and route traffic to the “community” site. I also can’t find an RSS feed except on the individual blogs (and so far, only Marco Shaw seems likely to actually blog there).
One last thing, which I was at first not going to say, but after surfing the “blog” section and forums and finding them decorated the same way, I can’t hold back: That is quite honestly the ugliest web site I’ve seen in a while. It’s roughly the color of the swirling brown stuff in the bottom of the toilet after you throw up, and there’s more bits of scrolling, pulsing, and throbbing flash and javascript than I’ve ever seen outside of MySpace.
Update
It turns out that Sapien (Don Jones’ company) is, in fact, going to close their PowerShell Forum and move their PowerShell-related blogging to throw their whole weight behind this new site. So that means all three of the Bloggers listed on PowerShellCommunity.org will be actually blogging there. Nevermind that this makes it look, for now, even more like a Sapien spin piece than an community-driven site, it’s certainly a guarantee of some success, since one presumes that some of the traffic on the sapien forum will actually move to the new location, and all of these guys have been fairly consistent bloggers.
Update
Well, just for the record … I’ve been flipping around on the “community” site and I have a few more gripes. There is a script repository, but it’s not searchable, it’s practically empty, has no download links, and displays scripts double-spaced and without highlighting. Plus, posting scripts requires registration — on a site which as yet has no privacy policy and appears to be partially owned by Microsoft
(there was a rumor about a 501c non-profit, but there’s no trace of that on the site, even on the “About us” page which merely says it’s run by Don Jones —an MVP, author, speaker, blogger and corporate ).
Just for kicks, compare their scripts page to the PowerShell Central Scripts site (note that I help out with PowerShell Central, and it’s independently run by Brandon Shell (another MVP) and also has no privacy policy, but then, it doesn’t require you to sign up). Oh, and for now you can access the scripts interface directly … but don’t tell Brandon I told you about it
Feedback Works
They’ve fixed a lot of these problems …
It’s unfortunate that you didn’t feel comfortable contacting me directly to obtain answers to some of the questions you raise here, or that you didn’t feel comfortable making suggestions about the community either in our forums or directly to me. We’re all quite happy to act upon reasonable suggestions, and we’ve tried to be clear that the community is still in “soft open” and is being adjusted. In fact, this weekend has seen a major set of adjustments finally made live after significant development. It’s honestly tough to try and do something valuable for the PowerShell user community and then have it attacked rather viciously without any kind of chance to explain, to follow-up, or to accept constructive criticism. I hope in the future you’ll feel that you can participate by offering actionable suggestions and perhaps even helping out – you’re certainly welcome. You’ve made comments here which I’ll choose to interpret as questions, and I’ll try to answer them in my own blog entry this week – but you’re more than welcome to follow-up directly; I certainly don’t mean to start some intra-blog flame war and will try to take some pains so that my response doesn’t come across that way.
Shell Tools has also said it was transforming powershell live into a customer support area. And a number of forums have been locked, some others deleted and some put in an obsolete group. On one sense it is sad to us, the death of a dream, but on another sense its a relief as we just didn’t have the resources to develop it to the level we’d want. With PowershellCommunity.org we have the resources to give it a good go IMO, even though i’m sure there is much tweaking needed along the way.