Re: My first stab at the site

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim ximian com>]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 10:10:09PM -0600, Steve Fox wrote:
> On 15 Mar 2001 21:50:22 -0600, Joakim Ziegler wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 08:49:26PM -0600, Steve Fox wrote:

>>> Nobody has any comments on using the SourceForge code? No one likes the idea? 

>> I'm sadly a little busy this week, so I haven't had time to look at it too
>> much.
 
> I know how that goes! I'm just glad I was finally able to find time to
> do it. Sorry for being impatient. I was hoping maybe we'd have something
> together by gnome-1.4, but I highly doubt that it'll happen.

Yeah. I talked to jdub about this on IRC yesterday, and I think it's pretty
obvious that that's just not going to happen. So I suggest decoupling the
1.4 release and the new website completely. This has the advantage that we
have time to polish it a lot so we can deploy a perfect site *cough*.


>> I'm interested in learning more about the sourceforge engine, in particular
>> customizability and features.

> Well, the nice thing is that your interface is very customizable. Each
> theme can use its own colors and images. You basically have a couple
> basic functions that each theme has to implement (header, footer,
> box1_top, box1_middle, box1_bottom), but each of those functions can do
> whatever. 

> I feel really strong that the Trove software map would be good to use.
> We could hack it so that when software is updated, people can receive
> email notices. That way GNOME projects which aren't hosted on
> SourceForge don't need to create their own -announce mailing lists. It's
> a thought anyways.

The software map is indeed quite nice. It's easily superior to the one we
currently have. Also the user system might be interesting, if we could
integrate it so people can manage their project affiliations using the
software map, etc. This is interesting.


> As far as using the forums/news capability to replace Gnotices, I think
> it's work really cool. Since people can create accounts (maybe front
> page customization at a later time?), they can also monitor postings and
> have followups mailed to them.

The forums look more Usenet/open discussion oriented, though. We'd like
something along the lines of Slashdot/Squishdot/etc., more like a news
posting site where people happen to be able to attach comments to the
postings. I didn't see anything along those lines on the SF site, but perhaps
I'm wrong.


>> Also, what are the disadvantages to using it?

> Hehe...you're a smart one aren't you? :0) There's no real big
> disadvantages other than having to grep through all the code to remove
> references to SourceForge and Alexandria (the project name). We'd have
> to tweak the user system a bit since we won't be offering
> user users gnome org mail aliases. 

There are some disadvantages I see. Note, I've mainly looked around on
SourceForge itself, not at what's possible with the codebase. So there might
be stuff I'm wrong about, because it's possible, but SourceForge doesn't do it.

The codebase seems very oriented towards services as opposed to content.
Which makes sense, since all SF is is the user contributed content. But this
focus doesn't fit the GNOME site very well, since we consist at least 60% of
static content, and the SF codebase isn't very focused on that (for instance,
the navigation of their About SourceForge sections and others are not very
nice at all).

There's no autogeneration of menus, no automatic navigation system, very
little in the way of smart formatting of content, etc. This stuff is
necessary to manage a heavy content site like the GNOME one.

So to me, it seems like there's good functionality in SF, but perhaps it's
easier to rip out the stuff we need. That, of course, would depend on how
interdependent the SF code base is. In my experience, large web codebases
like that lack a bit of generalization and are very interdependent. But in
the worst of cases, we can at least look at how SF does things when we need
to duplicate that functionality.

What do other people think?

-- 
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/