Why I am a grumpy killjoy

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi,

To start at the start. In the debate on the topic of a Zope or a PHP
based news system, my basic feelings are: I couldn't care less.

The reason I am sceptical about ditching Zope in the near future is that
our current setup works and Michael Bernstein have offered to help us
make the needed tweaks to make it work better. 

While a new grand news system that merges news from 10 smaller GNOME
news sites seems grand it isn't really something we short term need.
Today we have approx. 2 stories a day average and that number has been
stable for some time. So my feeling is that we just get 10 low traffic,
low activtity newsfeeds in addition to our working main newsfeed.

So does that mean I will work hard to stop anyone who wants to make such
a system, no I will not. This is a volunteer project and if jdub wants
to spend his evenings implementing such a system then that is ok.

I do however think that getting the new website up, and all our current
content moved into it, without any fancy additions like newsfeed,
themeing etc. will be a very big task anyway. 
So given a choice I would prefer if we focused on that for the next 3-6
months instead of making grand plans that only delay us even more.

As for the question raised here about how to do these new pages (server
side detection, javascript etc.). Well once again I would vote for the
choice of technology that would let us get our new look online as soon
as possible. If we then get a solution that looks less good on Netscape
Classic than on newer browsers, then so be it.

After we have the new site up and running and all content moved to it,
then I think it is time to do stuff like themeing and visonary newsfeed
systems. 

But all of this is just my opinion and I am probably just a old grumpy
dude. :)

Christian