Re: Suggestion for the News site

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 02:04:34PM -0500, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

>> Anyhow, as always I think the pressing issue for the GNOME web is to
>> fix the content, not to change the technology _again_ - Gnotices
>> actually has useful content, so I'd say upgrade the Squishdot,
>> rearrange the look (Squishdot lets you change a lot of appearance
>> things), and don't break it. Let Advogato be Advogato and Gnotices be
>> Gnotices.

> That is one good step, it minimizes headache and work for the
> maintainers compared to the SlashApp and Advogato solutions.

> And I agree that it is a good idea to focus on the content.  I am
> worried though that our "content management strategy" is still based
> around "port every HTML file to a new system, and hope that the
> content will appear on its own".

> I have not looked at what the new GNOME web team is doing, but it
> seems to be like a plain php3 based system that includes headers and
> footers is not really an ideal way of managing our content.

With all due respect, Miguel, you seem to not quite know what you're talking
about here. I've been seeing what people want to do with the GNOME site for
over a year now, and I might have some better idea of this.

It's true that we are doing a template system, most likely based on PHP. This
is the *only* way to create the general GNOME site that will satisfy the
people wanting to work on it. I'm not sure what you're suggesting as a better
"content management system", but the wildly different expectations people
have to how they should add their own content makes anything more advanced
than a template system useless. For instance, the current system uses WML and
Auto*, and is largely ignored by people porting over their old content, such
as the GMC, Gnumeric and other project sites.

Also, I don't know what's inherently wrong with a well-written set of
templates and CVS for version control, etc. It's what we do at Ximian, and
it's comparable to the complexity and methodology used by the GNOME
translation team, which definitely includes a lot of not extremely technical
people, if that was your concern.

Now, the lack of up to date content is a problem, and this problem needs to
be solved. My primary approach to solving that problem up to now has been to
remove barriers to entry for people wanting to contribute. A template system
based on PHP (which requires minimal knowledge of PHP to use for content
authors) and residing in CVS seems to be the optimal way to do that, as
opposed to the current method, which involves installing WML and learning how
to use it, both non-trivial tasks.

When the new system is working, I've planned to recruit people who want to
maintain the information on the site. One of the sources of such volunteers
seems to be the documentation and translation community we have, and we also
have some new people on the list already who don't know how to code, but want
to help maintain and keep the site up to date.

-- 
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/