It took us a humongous effort and time to get Confluence to run within
the ASF so we can now have the "cwiki".
Confluence is great and we continue to find more cool features, but the
main goal of the cwiki is to be a "wiki" itself, we use it to document
the project.
First it was just the documentation, then we added more stuffs like the
FAQ ( aka GMOxKB ), now we plan to develop the project's web site
directly in Confluence. So far so good, Confluence is great for
collaboration and we can add templates and make the autoexported HTML
look even cooler.
I grant that authoring the Web site in Confluence, get it exported to
HTML and served from geronimo.apache.com might be better to what we have
today but I definitively do not agree in moving everything we have
exported as static HTML in Confluence to the main geronimo.apache.org site.
I disagree even more in trying to use an external to the ASF Confluence
installation to generate static HTML and then put it back into the main
site. (Going outside the ASF every time we can't get the things the way
we want should be a separate thread)
anyway, web site authoring aside, what are the benefits of moving all
the cwiki content, just a change in the URL? what is the issue if we
have pointers back and forth on both sites?
Just as an example, we initially had the FAQ on the web site (well, had
others in the old wiki and spread out throughout the documentation),
then we created a KB space in confluence and consolidated all FAQ into
that space. Why take it back to geronimo.apache.org/KB? In the web site
there is a link on every single page pointing directly to the KB in the
cwiki.
Back to the web site authoring, let's assume we have access to the file
system. We would have to copy all the autoexported HTML somewhere else,
fix all the links and images ( the autoexport plugin has some "issues" )
and then put it into the svn repository. Once there, we all know the
procedure to get it published. One thing to keep in mind is that we
would not have the site's source versioned in svn, rolling back from
backup may not be an easy tasks.
I think that the effort of authoring the web site ( just the web site )
is worth pursuing and I'm more than willing to contribute to find a more
elegant solution for developing the web site.
It would be great if we can all agree on what content belongs to the
wiki and what content belongs to the web site ( dynamic vs. static ).
Cheers!
Hernan
Jason Dillon wrote:
So, it looks like there is going to need some convincing to get access
to the exported content, so that we can post process and massage these
spaces into our main website.
I'm not even sure that it is going to be worth the effort to try and
convince Apache infra that we need the access. Seems like they are only
willing to give accounts on systems to Apache members.
So, I wonder if we could just run our own Confluence instance on our
zone, only use it to author, then export the content, massage and then
svn ci. I guess we could also do the same by moving the spaces to
goopen.org too, which will provide us the required access to implement
the site that we all want to implement.
I'm frustrated... we now have a Confluence instance on ASF, but we can't
really use it to produce the results we want... unless you want to see
http://geronimo.apache.org become a set of http://cwiki.apache.org*
URs... which I find very distasteful.
There might be some way to configure httpd to rewrite urls so that
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxSITE looks like http://geronimo.apache.org
and that http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxKB looks like
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxKB, etc... but I wonder if that is really
worth all of the effort.
I guess we could use wget to grab the entire
http://cwiki.apache.org/GMOxSITE and then massage and check in... but
that is terribly inefficient and add more unwanted time lapse between
updating content to making the content live.
So, in short... I can't do anything related to making GMOxSITE the
official website until there is a way to get access to the exported
content, or get the httpd configuration changed for our vhost.
I feel like we have a spiffy new Ferrari that we can only drive at 5
mph... and as soon as you hit 6 mph it starts to hit you on the head.
:-(
--jason
