Re: GNOME Website Meeting

[Carsten Senger <senger rehfisch de>]

Hi Lucas,

Lucas Rocha schrieb:
> Hi all,
>
> We're in a tricky situation. I'm seeing people working on slightly
> different directions here. 

Can you tell what these different directions are?

> 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?

I'll try to be there at 21 UTC, but I can't promise it.

> 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 unmaintained/broken/outdated/etc just some months after the migration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.

If there are important reasons for a redecision there would be no 
complaint from me after 2 1/2 years and no finished plone site even if I 
believe we can finish the plone side of wgo.

The questions about maintainance and evolution of wgo are very important 
 for the gnome project. Did there exist any plans about that before? 
I've only a partial view through the stuff I read in the archives.

I had planned to actively support wgo after a launch at least until it's 
stable, approx. 6 month. I'll stay longer if I'll be happy and feel 
comfortable in the community. But I will be available for questions 
otherwise. This time will be sufficient to have the required knowledge 
in the admin team and in the team that manages wgo content.
Maybe there is some drive in the gnome community to add new 
functionality to wgo and thus communitiy members get involved into 
extending Plone. You gnome folks can appraise this better.

Also the Plone community is big, open and helpfull. It may be smaller 
than other CMS communities, but the number of active, experienced and 
professional members in the plone community is high enough to give 
support to the gnome community. The wgo project is recognized in the 
plone community even if most people can't contribute to the wgo 
development from scratch.

Technically a running Plone system is the same as any other running 
server software. Problems arise on the mailinglists now and then, but in 
my experience Plone is rather maintainance free beside few security 
updates, scaling for performance reasons and hardware changes.

The first urgent need for deeper plone knowledge will be soonest early 
2012. Until then the major release we use now will get security updates. 
If wgo launches with Plone and we start with Plone 4 (to be released at 
the end of the year), this will probably be 2014.

Maybe you can tell a bit more about the maintenance and especially 
evolution needs to get a better idea.

> 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.

On the first sight this does not interfere with plone development beside 
the need to redo the theme. Reorganizing the content within the site is 
not the problem here unless you switch from a structured organization to 
something like faceted navigation.

Redoing a theme will be work, but doing it with the people who did the 
graphic design will speed up things.

> 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.

The vaguest part in my opinion is the translation stuff. Hopefully we do 
have some more information on that on Monday. If we continue, we can set 
up a roadmap with some milestones that includes the other participants 
like the i18n and the admin team.

> 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.

Yeah, let's meet on Monday and clear things.

..Carsten