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Hey I'm a fairly new Pico user. Check out my early attempts as a Picoist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFpylkjipyI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcvStK3HX9A
Plan on joining the Alpha contest when I get a little better... :-)

What I've found so far is that there isn't a lot of formal updated documentation available for eigenartists. There is some great information in the forums. But, the current forums software is very rudimentary and cumbersome to keep up with and find stuff.

The good news is there's some great opensource apps out there that could really supercharge our community experience and give eigenlab's a better opportunity to leverage this community for ideas, feedback and marketing.

#1> You need an active and updated blog to keep us updated on
- product roadmap
- releases
- features in unstable releases
- what inhouse musicians are up too
- contests
- etc....

#2> A real Community Forum like a PHPBB or some other opensource BBS with these features turned on
- Facebook and/or twitter login
- RSS
- Post videos in the posts

These apps are all free and pretty easy to setup and think would really benefit the community!

I'm indeed trying to get a public community going but am explicitly not creating another forum. I think it would be a shame to start duplicating this one here. Eigenlabs is busy improving it and we've recently gained access to forum-wide search. Other features will most definitely follow in the future.

Hi David

Our website is all based on open source - it's a Django site and uses a fair number of public domain modules . It is however a multi server, load balanced configuration with a lot of its static content and all large files served out of a CDN - this gives you great speed from multiple locations. But the combination of security (we have to conform to some fairly stiff rules as we take credit cards), scalability via a multi server installation with load balancing and making this fast to use for worldwide users with a CDN make adding features a somewhat slower process than typing 'apt-get' and writing a confiuration file. You could argue that this infrastructure is a premature optimisation, but we have already seen some very hefty peaks in usage, usually whenever a major news outlet or artist are involved - the loadbalancing and CDN really come into their own then as you do not experience poor quality of service. And I'm sure many here remember how slow it could sometimes be downloading new software before we got that into the CDN.

This is a tradeoff (in line with getting right at the beginning really, as you suggest) that we decided we'd make before we launched - we'd trade some speed of execution for scalability and a better, more consistent user experience.

Patrick, our ERP and Web programmer, only actually joined us a few weeks ago (his predecessor left before christmas) and you can already see some great progress - the search on the forums is now live, we have a wiki in the works and after that we'll be looking at improving (as you've suggested) the forums further. Please bear with us while he finds his feet..

John

PS; I also really don't like PHP. Insecure, hard to maintain. Horrible language in my book. A minor predjudice that entirely came about by using PHP in the first, pre publication version of eigenlabs.com. Using PHP components would also mean that we need a whole new set of language skills in the dev team - the web chap would need good Python and PHP. That would shrink our hiring pool quite dramatically.