wgo revamp: Drupal or Wiki ? or a wiki in Drupal ?

["AMAZIGH Aneglus" <aneglus gmail com>]

Hi !

I'm a little lost in this discussion. It looks like we look for a
(new) solution for wgo.

The problem is that now the site is

- messy
- hard to find information
- lake of i18n
- too many domains
- hard to create "local" websites... (behdad pointed this out)
- Uniformity or coherence... I mean many websites many layouts and
many password to remember...

let's list all gnome websites or part of the gnome website :

- http://gnome.org/
- http://planet.gnome.org/
- http://www.gnomedesktop.org/ (is a news website) formerly footnotes
- http://gnome.org/softwaremap/ --> http://www.gnomefiles.org/
- http://foundation.gnome.org/
-- fundraising.
-- board
-- ...
- http://art.gnome.org/
- http://gnomesupport.org/
-- forums
-- ML
-- IRC
- http://gnome.org/contact/
- http://guadec.org/
- http://live.gnome.org/ (a wiki, which is today the most active place
= need of a wiki)
- http://developer.gnome.org/
-- bounties
-- bugzilla
-- dev's documentations

don't forget that a guy is working on library.gnome.org for SoC 2006 [4]

Visitors could be simple "Users" or "Contributors" (any kind of) or
future Contributors :)

Normal Users (NU) want to
- "learn", discover new things about their desktop : library, journal,
footnotes (maybe we could add tips and tutorials about specific
applications on the library)
- get some plug ins for his/her favorite application -- get it in the
application's page. (epiphany, gedit, rhythmbox...)
- get new arts.. --> art.gnome.org
- find help --> gnomesupport, irc

Footnotes is good, but it should be under the same banner.
Gnome Journal is also good because it provide interesting news for
both NUsers and Devs
Art.go is also a good place even if I assume that it could be improved.

Contributors want to find answers:
HOWTO translate
HOWTO begin contributing
HOWTO make a gnome app
WHAT kind of techno ?
GNOME world ?
And What is a gnome app ! :)
...

(the mozilla dev center is a good dev place i think)

All this questions should be solved by the library.go

but we should add something like the webwatch [1] and devnews [2] of
the mozilla developer center. Because it is really usefull and don't
feet on the footnotes part of the site (not the same public)

I think that the Software map is really important because we could
start everything from their.  But what is a gnome app ?! I don't know,
it is a huge debate but we could start to put their some of the main
applications like epiphany, evolution, rhythmbox, deskbar, gedit,
gthumb... maybe tomboy, gimmie, beagle. The thing is whether the devs
will want to move their website or not... another problem: have we
enough space and bandwitch... let's believe that we have enough space
and bandwitch then we could add any applications that seems to be
'enough' integrated to the desktop we could eventually add some
requirements like using 'gnome' techno gstreamer, dbus, gtk (which IMO
account for being well integrated to the desktop).

Let's describe the website of an application:
1. About Page, description, who is maintaining this project, latest
release WHEN (!)
2. Plug-ins (if the number of application using plug ins increase we
should think about a plugins.go [there is a similar SoC project for
gimp])
3. News (--> Feed 1)
5. Some Howto/FAQ ? maybe link to the library (preferred)
--> Need more help link to the related ML/forum/irc
7. Contributors corner
--> Dev news... --> (Feed 2)
--> i18n table
--> specific howtos
--> TODO
--> History/Sum-up of the past stories/issues
8. Wiki...

Then we will be able to build the DevNews (keep in touch with the
gnome dev world) with (Feed 2) and the UserNews (Feed 1) with
something like a planet (drupal already has a builtin similar tool).

Another problem : forum/ML/news//: we should be able to provide all at
-- the same time -- (let's give them the choice) but such a free
solution don't exist. Gmame is good but is not the right solution if
we want something uniform ("one banner")

Then we could provide blogs (and photo sharing), why ?
- a completely free blogging/photo sharing solution.
- provide this service for the gnome users (think about Luis' posts)

if we provide blogs, it will be easy for devs to cross-post. I mean
today, they post on ML, maybe on their blog and have to update the
website. With an integrated solution they may only write the
announcement and choose to post it on the app's website (it will
appear on the GnomeNews (today it is footnotes) or DevNews if it is a
dev release...) and his/her blog.

and why not a start page [3], a webmail what else ? :)

The thing is that some people won't use this tools. That's why we
should build some bridges... APIs...

I didn't spoke about library.go and art.go.

wgo goals should be 'one banner' 'one password' so we must build
bridges between all the part of the websites or build all the website
over the same framework.
The guy working on l.og looks died [4]. He planed to make it with
python, not php for the sake of speed. If he do so, one should build a
brige between wgo and library.

art.go : I don't know if it is written with php or python, whatever it
could be easly emulated with drupal but not with a wiki.

Foot Notes:

Drupal seems to be THE solution, because of goals like:

- 'one banner' (or almost),
- 'one domain',
- 'one login'
- 'lazyness' or  if you prefer 'lake of hands'.

With a wiki we will be in a dead lock or we will have to build bridges
with new tools that we could and IMO should build like 'start page'
[3] 'blogs'... Drupal is a complete framework for php development.
Moreover I believe (almost sure) that drupal has already a mediawiki
plugin :).

With drupal we can create groups like devs, NU, Xx i18n team, bug
squad and we can easily target information.



"GNOME is about people"... Civicspace too... (I'm just listing to
their ads i never used it... actually one time).

Maybe a wiki is more suitable to keep going this debate :)

NB:
1. Forgot the i18n issue, I assume that this one is solved by drupal.
We could tweak the server to serve all the localized content with url
like xxx.gnome.org/Lang/ (xxx) stand for blog/library/fondation...
2. the 'locals' website, I think that they shouldn't interfere with
the main website I mean, each country could customise the main page
but it will be safer to build new pages like country.gnome.org and add
a "feed" somewhere on the main page according to the localization.

I hope I made my point of view plain.

A.Amazigh
----------
[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/webwatch/
[2] http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/
[3] http://web2.0awards.org/ look at start page
[4] http://blog.goranrakic.com/archives/2006/06/librarygnomeorg_mockup.html