Re: wgo revamp timeline (proposal)

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Sat, 2006-07-08 at 00:58 +0200, Quim Gil wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 12:25 -0300, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote:
[snip]
> > And I did not make it clearer because I've already exposed this concern
> > to qgil in the process of setting up drupal for guadec.org.
>
> As said, I don't think the problems were caused by Drupal but about the
> GNOME/GUADEC human context and the server infrastructure.
>
> However, many have pointed that one of the keys of the GUADEC 2006
> success was the website. With all the problems we have got, the result
> seems to be much more satisfactory than the results obtained with the
> current wgo platform. 

I think this is very debatable. For instance,

1. Many people had difficulty finding information on the website due to:
1.1 the difficult-to-use structure.
1.2 the lack of structure. For instance, information was often simply
posted to the forums instead of being added to the main pages. These
forum posts were almost impossible to find as soon as they had left the
front page.

2. Almost nobody edited the pages, suggesting that they had some
difficult in doing this compared to a wiki. This is probably why they
(even you) used the forums. Even if you had changed the main pages, it
would not have been easy to see what had changed recently, and it's
currently impossible to view changes for a single page.

I don't know whether these problems are due to the use of Drupal itself, 
but it did confirm my fears that Drupal might force us to create a web 
site that consists of news items.

I have filed bugs for some of the things that make use of Drupal
difficult compared to a wiki, and which make it like a news site, but I
doubt that this is the full list:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341885
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341225
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334750
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334747

I did want us to have time to review guadec.org as the drupal test site
before committing to drupal for gnome.org. I don't believe that
guadec.org has proved that drupal is good enough for gnome.org, and I'm
not confident that we would fix drupal problems easily for gnome.org if
we couldn't fix them for guadec.org. In particular, guadec.org
completely failed to demonstrate that drupal is capable of supporting
translated sites.

But even if we don't have that review, or if don't use a new CMS, your
revamp plan leaves lots of room for other improvements, and I like the
idea of decisions being made at a certain point instead of waiting
indefinitely. 

> About Drupal vs MediaWiki vs etc, there is not much point discussing
> tools before agreeing requirements. By July 17th Greg Nagy needs to come
> up with a list of requirements for the wgo platform (CMS). Help him with
> the requirements if you want to help selecting the most appropriate
> tool(s).

Yes. Sorry for braindumping too early. Feel free to simply refer back to
this email at the appropriate time.

[snip]

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com