Re: Suggestion for the News site

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 10:19:32AM +0100, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   Okay, this is rather radical, but I would like people consider the
> idea, and at least evaluate it:

>   I suggest replacing the current news.gnome.org design with an
>   advogato like (mob_virgule based) news and community site

> Quick plus:

>   - it's stable !!! Sorry our news site has been down far too
>     frequently to accept this being the norm in the future
>   - it's relatively simple, well tested, seems to be reliable
>     it' probably far more lightweight than the current stuff
>   - It would allow Gnome hacker who have diaries to centralize
>     them and expose the community at work, also trying to merge
>     the gap between our user community and the people within the
>     project
>   - the format is well-known, no leaning step needed for the
>     visitors
>   - posting has a preview mode <grin/>
>   - it's fast to load !

> Quick minus:
>   - it's a rather radical change
>   - one would still need an export mechanism to read the news titles
>     in the main site, maybe an RDF feed will be sufficient
>   - may need some tuning to look a bit more like the rest of the
>     Gnome site.


> My personal point are that:
>   - I would like to improve the community sense and relationship
>   - I don't want to see our news site down again
>   - I don't find news.gnome.org attractive right now, I would like
>     to feel the need to visit it more often. Getting diaries and
>     more submissions is important.

> and I think an Advogato like site for news.gnome.org would fit the bill !

Daniel, nice to hear your feedback on this. Please know that news.gnome.org
will most likely be replaced by something, although we haven't decided what
yet. mod_virgule is a good idea, I like it a lot, however, it does present a
couple of problems. Mainly, we've been hoping to integrate news.gnome.org
with the main GNOME site more. That means the same look, the same navigation
system, etc. Now, that's difficult to do with mod_virgule, since the rest of
the site looks like it's mostly going to be using PHP. That means that every
time we change something in the layout of the main site, we'll have to make
that change once more, to the mod_virgule configuration. This is an
unfortunate situation that I'd like to try and avoid, if possible.

So I'm not sure how we solve this. It might seem like a trivial point, but
personally, at least, I'm trying to lower the barriers to maintenance as much
as possible, since the current site uses several different technologies, some
of them uncommon, and it's hardly getting any maintenance because it's too
much work for people.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Ximian web monkey - joakim ximian com - Radagast IRC
  FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
         http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.ximian.com/