GNOME Website Meeting

[Lucas Rocha <lucasr gnome org>]

Hi all,

We're in a tricky situation. I'm seeing people working on slightly
different directions here. We must make sure we're not wasting
anyone's energy and time around the new website. So, I'd like to
propose a meeting to discuss CMS, Design and Release Plan to make sure
we're all on the same page. The meeting could be next Monday (May 11)
9h UTC. What do you think?

Some quick personal notes on those topics:

CMS
I'm very worried about the the sustainability of Plone as our CMS,
especially in terms of available man power and long-term support. It's
been almost 3 years and still don't have a basic website running on
Plone... We can't afford to have the new website totally
unmaintained/broken/outdated/etc just some months after the migration
because we don't have anyone capable of maintaining it inside our
community. We need some sort of maintenance and evolution plan. And,
unfortunately, this might involve redeciding which CMS to use. But,
before any redecision or rediscussion on this topic, I'd like to hear
from Carsten and other volunteers actively working on the Plone
implementation.

Design
IMO, we should take this opportunity to bring a refreshed look to our
website. Andreas and Vinicius are working on an improved look and feel
for the website. This is *not* about short term html fixes on the
current website. This is something that still needs to be agreed as it
might involve some changes on the way we organise the content on the
website. This also has implications on our Release Plan because we
need to decide whether we put the new design as a goal for the new
website or not.

Release Plan
IMO, we don't have to hurry, really. It's more important that we do
the right thing than to quickly release something (and be careful to
not lose focus on getting things done). We should probably attach our
release schedule to GNOME 3.0 which is planned to be released by 2.30
(beginning of 2010). In practice, this means we should have milestones
for each upcoming GNOME release (i.e. 2.28 and 2.30). We can probably
release the website before 3.0 but it's quite important to have a
clear schedule reference.

I understand that we're in a very good moment to get things done and
that some people (Paul, Carsten, and others) are actively working on
making the new website happen right now. It's not my intention to
pushback the current momentum. The bottom line of this proposed
meeting is to step back a bit and make sure we know that we're doing
the right thing and doing it consistently.

Cheers!

--lucasr