Re: The future of gup in developer and bugzilla

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-02-10 at 00:31 +0100, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> 
> 
> 2006/2/9, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
>         MoinMoin Wiki, at least, has only a very primitive concept of
>         heirarchical nodes.  I don't see any way of putting pages
>         under 
>         particular sections and having global navigation automatically
>         provided based on those sections.
> 
> Hi Shaun, I have to jump in here, because I am slo active in the
> MoinMoin wiki project.
> 
> You can als have better navigation with MoinMoin (new theme, quick
> links). The problem with the live wiki is, that it is VERY outdated.
> The version 1.2.3 is from july 2004. MoinMoin is now at 1.5.1. Before
> this were the 1.3.x versions. This would mean to choose GNOME 2.6
> today , where we nearly have GNOME 2.14. Another project using
> MoinMoin is Fedora: http://www.fedoraproject.org. There you can see
> how much you can make of a MoinMoin wiki, although it is already
> outdated.
>  
> A good point in MoinMoin is, that it is easily extendable with plugins
> and it is written in Python and it is being highly actively developed.
> That means that GNOME can very easy add all functionally it likes to
> have. I think GNOME has many good Python programmers.
> 
> 
>          A CMS gives you all the same advantages of a wiki, plus
>         it provides tools for consistent navigation and allows
>         certain 
>         pages or subsections to be built using tools more appropriate
>         for their particularly needs.
> 
> The wiki technology MoinMoin presents is hardly used (categories for
> example). The good thing about wikis is, that they do not limit you in
> any way, but a CMS does. A CMS is good if you want to do 2-3 things. A
> wiki is better if you do not know what future will bring. I would vote
> for a live wiki as a background for many projects and to have specific
> sites like www.gnome.org that use other technology.

If MoinMoin is capable of everything I think we should have,
then I apologize for misrepresenting it.  Having plugins and
such to manage different types of pages differently sounds to
me like what content management systems do, whereas wikis have
traditionally simply presented the same shorthand syntax stuff
for every single page.

What I strongly oppose is using different systems for every
single subsite.  Let X be MoinMoin, Drupal, or any other code
for managing our sites.  If X can handle developer, then it
can surely handle www.  Using a single system for as many of
our subsites as possible makes it easier for people to work
on web stuff.  It also makes it easier for us to maintain
consistent navigation across all pages, which we really must
try to do.

Now, there will be particular subsites whose needs might not
be met by X.  If we really can't get X to do it, then we'll
just have to suck it up and use a separate system.  But we
should evaluate our X's based on how many of our subsites
they can handle.

Let's look at what we need in different places:

everywhere: All pages on all subsites should have the same
header, presenting unified global navigation.

www: We need largely static pages that are rich in content,
attractive, well-organized, and easy to update.

developer: We need the same as for www.  Remember, we need
pages that cater to ISDs, as well as the sort of scratch
pages we need for internal development.

status: The documentation and translation teams have had
discussions about creating a unified status site providing
the translation statistics, the documentation status, and
anything else we might want to show.  This requires build
scripts and lots of CVS checkouts in the background.

library: This will require build scripts and CVS checkouts
in the background.  Maybe it should share infrastructure
with status.  The tools to build documentation either are
already in gnome-doc-utils, or they should be put there.
Extra pages need to be constructed for navigation.

themes: This needs dynamic user submissions and stuff.

footnotes: Largely the same needs as themes.

store: The Foundation has been looking into merchandising.
So something will have to be done about that on the web end.

You get the idea.  Also bear in mind events, foundation,
support, and projects.

Anyway, that's my perspective on things.

--
Shaun