Re: Ideas for gnome.org

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org> wrote:

...

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.

Might be nice to think about including those, certainly. It somewhat depends on the overall design and not letting it get too cluttered.

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.

The lack of an easy way to edit is obviously a potential disadvantage. You'd still have the access control system for the blog though, which is where you really need it. My impression is that very few people edit pages on gnome.org currently, and the content doesn't change all that often.

Currently if you have access to one of our git repositories, you have access to all of them.

That could be an issue indeed, although it is already the case for some parts of gnome.org (you need to use git to change the screenshot on the home page, for example).

Other things we'd need to think about:

• Search (is it needed for a minimal site? Would we want a global GNOME search that would bring in results from different GNOME sites (yes please!)?

• Translations - we haven't got them working for the current website - how much work would it be to get them working? Would it be easier for a different setup?

• Integration with the blog, through RSS or similar.

• Integration with Friends of GNOME/Paypal.

And so on.

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.

For what it's worth, I count about 25 pages that we would want to keep. News posts would stay in Wordpress so migration should be OK.

We also need to pay attention to existing URL so that we don't break anything.

Sure.

Allan