Re: [Gimp-web] Proposal: gimp-web-revamp

[Pat David <patdavid gmail com>]

Ok, so I have some thoughts on this if you all don't mind indulging me...

I love the idea of a site re-design for a number of reasons (better
organization of content, modern look, better usability for access to
important information quickly and efficiently for users, lowering the
barrier to entry for contributions, etc...).

Having recently spent all my free time building out pixls.us for fun, I'm
still neck deep in this stuff so it's fun to think about.

I feel it would be beneficial to separate content from presentation.  This
allows the same content to be massaged into different forms later on
(hopefully relatively easily).  Using something like Markdown for page data
is a very nice way to significantly lower the barrier for others to
contribute (but is by no means a guarantee that they will - just that it
would be a lot easier than it is currently).

I also tend to like the static site generation path.  My personal main
consideration for a page/site is to make it as lightweight, fast, and as
useful as possible.  This generally also has the benefit of reducing
vectors for possible malicious acts.

So, if we consider the idea of using intermediate content files (markdown)
and passing them through a static generator of some sort (jekyll,
metalsmith, whatever) then we just need to address how best to handle the
back-end data.

(As a side note, so far this is exactly how I have been building out
pixls.us, just using markdown and metalsmith (node.js) to generate the
site).

Is the ability to have multiple GIT repositories and permissions something
we can easily setup on our existing infrastructure?  Is it something we
_should_ consider setting up?  At the moment, when working on things on
wgo, I just update my local copy of wgo, merge, work, push, etc...

I am busy building out another site at the moment, but things are still
fresh in my head, and as such I'd be willing to start work on a redesign of
wgo.  I'm going to start making some notes and thoughts on the wiki:

http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/WGO_Redesign

I may also branch wgo to start testing some ideas, but I will have some
questions about the "application layer" setup as described by Cristobal...