[gentoo-dev] Plans for new website.

[Karl Trygve Kalleberg <karltk@prosalg.no>]

Hi gentooers.

<t4k30v4r>

IRC junkies drobbins, g2boojum, Thread, myself and a few passers-by had a 
fruitful discussion on how to restructure/upgrade/extend the gentoo.org web
system in the near future. 

Here are the results of that first conversation. If anybody has anything to 
add, criticisms to make, or want to help out on any of parts, please post 
back to this list.

List of points:


 - Divide gentoo web system into two disjoint parts:
	- dynamic, for developers
	- static, for end-users

  Rationale: We do not have enough server horsepowers (in terms of bandwidth)
  to have a fully-dynamic end-user site, if we get the number of users that we
  wish for. 

 - Use XML for all documents 

  Rationale: XML here is just a fancy name for "structured". I'll not bore 
  you with why we think structured documents are far superior to unstructured
  ones. Start a new thread for this flamewar ;p

 - It would be cool if 
	- We could just add a file to a directory, and it'd show up on the 
	site (g2boojum)
	- the main page had news, in the spirit of PHPNuke (drobbins)
	- had a "last updated" thing on each page (drobbins)
	- shrank the top header bar to 1/2 the height (drobbins)
	- more effectively used the left link area (drobbins)
	- had a "printable version" of each page (drobbins)
	- had a package database online (drobbins)
	- had a section for bios of the dev team (drobbins)
	- had bug-reporting features in the package database (karltk)
	- had an online-shoppe of olde and fresh gentoo cds (drobbins)
	- the dev-wiki was extended to support team-work (drobbins)
	- had team pages, which contains: (drobbins)
		- name of the team
		- list of team members
		- title of each member
		- team email
		- team mailing list
		- up-to-date list of all packages managed by the team
		- contents of stable team release
		- contents of unstable team release
		- outstanding problems with stable release
		- outstanding problems with unstable release
		- team leader
		- team-wiki
	- merge team wikis with main wiki, using a team-field in all posts
	 (g2boojum)
	- mirroring dynamic stuff is troublesome (karltk)
	- search facility on the main site (karltk)
	- icon/color for each time in the mega-wiki (Thread, karltk)
	- parsing comments in each ebuild to add it to a team's 
	responsibility list (drobbins, karltk)
	- we could add new teams and in the future, sub teams. (drobbins)

  Note: This is the list of "neat stuff we want". Please add new things 
  here. If any of the points on this list isn't understandable, please make 
  notify the list and I'll clarify as best as I can.

  Rationale: We intend for this list to "float around" for a week or two, so 
  that everybody get their chance to contribute and come with input. Then the
  web team will traverse the list in prioritised order and implement the 
  features (more or less ;p).

If the majority if the developers think the dichotomy of the web site is 
acceptable, we should perhaps split this discussion off into two threads.

Especially important to uncover in the developers section would be how we 
envision teams to operate. Which support facilities do they need from the web
system ? Bug database, package lists, task lists, etc, etc..

The end-user section will probably stay fairly rudimentary for a bit longer, 
as we simply don't have too much content here. As we manage to collect more
HOWTOs, we should look into how to structure this. 

In the meantime, should we forward wayward users to linuxdoc.org in some way ?


Kind regards,

Karl T