Re: www.gnome.org redesign status

[Christopher Warner <cwarner kernelcode com>]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:

On 04/21/2009 03:45 PM, David Bain wrote:

Is there anything wrong with collecting donations in order to sponsor a
single person or organization to implement the site. The Drupal guys
have had to raise funds in order to sponsor redesign their own site!
http://drupal.org/node/356002 (their target is $15,000).

1) No one person can do this job,

2) Sponsoring someone to do it is the wrong approach, as it will start falling apart again as soon as the contract is over,

3) $15,000 can buy a contractor's services for a very short period of time. Nothing close to what it takes to get the job done.  What the Drupal guys are doing is to raise funds to sponsor sprints.  That is, travel reimbursements. No one gets paid to work on it.

We are certainly interested in doing website hackfests.  But in the past, there were not enough people (read: 3) to fly to a hackfest to begin with.

I don't know if I speak for everyone, but I'm willing and have been
willing to help out but it has come down to whether I can afford the time.

See above.

behdad

To add my two cents I agree with Murray in the fact that this is something simple. The problem is and has always been time. So in a sense I agree with David as well.. No matter what the chosen technology the problem is one of time and everyone working on this thus far has only gotten short stints of time here and there. It's simply not enough to maintain the site.

So my personal feelings aside it's not the technology; it's not like Gnome can't find people capable of writing html or dealing with Plone or some other CMS. It's that we need a group of people dedicated to getting an initial version through with sufficient time to do so. A developer sprint would be nice but i've tried that on numerous occasion and it hasn't worked.

There simply needs to be a dedicated team with the time to work on the redesign to completion. If that can't be done, this will lag on until then and we'll have these discussions every 6 months.

-C