Re: Ideas for gnome.org

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 5:43 PM,  <aday gnome org> wrote:
> Hi all,

Hey,

> A GNOME blog could exist as part of the existing gnome.org Wordpress site,
> as a rebranded news section. However, it could also be moved out to a
> separate domain of its own (such as blog.gnome.org), hosted as part of the
> blogs.gnome.org site (perhaps with a feed of articles shown on the gnome.org
> home page).

That made think of something: why don't we include more content from
our various feeds into our Web site? For now we only have the three
latest news items on the homepage, but we could have the latest
headlines from the planet (just the titles, not the article contents)
and tweets from our various handles. That would make it more dynamic
and engage the audiance.

> This got me wondering: if the blog part of the site was moved elsewhere,
> would there be any reason to continue using Wordpress for gnome.org?! With
> the blogging part being taken care of by a separate site, maybe we could go
> with  more minimal solution for gnome.org. Having experienced this type of
> website setup for flatpak.org, I have to say that it's a really nice way to
> work, and it could make it easier to do a redesign of the website.

I've been a huge proponent of static site generators and the likes for
the last ten years, but you may want to think twice about doing such a
migration.

Editing with Wordpress is quite easy: you log in to a Web interface,
get a text area to write in, and then you click a button to publish.
Many of the static engines require more technical knowledge and setup,
often requiring cloning and pushing to a git clone. That probably will
have an impact if you want to get newcomers to contribute. Wordpress
also has an ACL implementation that allows roles to be attributed and
permission to be more granular than just can or cannot publish stuff.
Currently if you have access to one of our git repositories, you have
access to all of them.

Then there's the question of the migration path. Many engines have
import machinery so that should be alright. We need to make sure it
works though. We also need to pay attention to existing URL so that we
don't break anything.

> Obviously these are just random ideas and need a lot more thought. Maybe
> they're interesting though?!

They are indeed. ☺

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker & Foundation Director