Re: www.gnome.org

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Mon, 2008-10-27 at 14:53 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Murray Cumming wrote:
> > On Sun, 2008-10-26 at 18:07 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > [snip]
> > > I have a
> > > different approach to the solution: Lets install a readily available CMS, like
> > > Joomla, plug it into our existing LDAP account system, make it easy for
> > > everyone with commit access to create a web password and edit.  Then we can
> > > mobilize the hundreds of our volunteers to keep the website up to date instead
> > > of looking for The One.
> >
> > That's as likely to make things worse as to make them better, and it's
> > likely to lock us into something before we've thought properly about
> > whether that's what we want. For instance, it would make it even more
> > difficult to eventually have a website whose content can be translated
> > as easily as our GNOME desktop application and documentation text.
>
> Do we absolutely need that feature?  I'm very doubtful of people jumping at it
> and actually translating more than, say, 5 pages.

It was, I think, the most important feature that we considered when
choosing a new www.gnome.org system.

I think having 5 pages translated, and kept up to date, would be wonderful. 
However, I think the entire site would be translated in many languages if 
we made it possible. The GNOME translation team are amazing. They seem to 
love translating applications, release notes, documentation, anything that 
we even vaguely make available for translation.

> > I'd be particularly worried about using any CMS that didn't let us see the 
> > changes that all these hundreds of people made day to day.
>
> Details?  Isn't Plone development open?

I mean, if someone changed some text on a web page, I want to see that
change, just like we do now in svn or the wiki. That's also necessary to
keep translations up-to-date.

> What has frightened me about the Plone plan is that when I read messages about
> it, it's always about coding and making changes in Plone itself, while I had
> expected it to be customization and configuration for GNOME's use.  What's so
> different about GNOME's requirements needing so much changes in an
> off-the-shelf CMS?

Yes, this worries me too. But if it lives then let's review it then.

Note that the translation feature is new (and not finished, I believe).
However, this is fairly understandable because no open-source CMS in the
world seems to offer this feature, certainly not via .po files. But
that's not what's causing difficulties now.


-- 
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