Le 5 août 07 à 16:53, David Chisnall a écrit :

> On 4 Aug 2007, at 03:22, Jesse Ross wrote:
>
>>  - The blog is using a different content management system
>> (Blogger) than the rest of the site (Mediawiki), thus we're all
>> maintaining two separate accounts to get content onto the site.
>
> This is the one that really irritates me.  The Blogger interface is
> absolutely terrible.  The rich text editing thing doesn't work at all
> (it randomly drops characters, or decides I want to overwrite
> something I've already written).  The HTML entry seems to mangle my
> HTML in unexpected ways.  It doesn't notify me of comments left on my
> blog entries, so I don't reply to them punctually, and it doesn't
> notify people that I've responded to them, making the comments system
> useless (not to mention the lack of threading etc.)  Having to
> maintain a separate account for that is mildly irritating too.

Fully agreed.

>>  - Content management/navigation of Mediawiki is problematic (pages
>> are not in well-defined parent categories, end-users have
>> difficulty accessing relevant content)
>
> Part of this is a layout issue with our current design.  We have some
> navigation boxes at the top, and some on the side, and I tend to
> forget about the ones at the top (they don't provide a strong visual
> clue that they are navigation related).

I observe this tendency too.

> I also don't update things as often as I should
> because MediaWiki markup is a pain to use (and very badly documented).

You can find a complete markup documentation summarized here: <http:// 
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Wikitext> This page was a lot easier to  
find previously :-/ There is also a reference card: <http:// 
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Reference_card>
If you don't like, you can use HTML directly instead of the wiki  
markup when you edit website pages. This is a feature I personally  
like in Mediawiki. Here is HTML markup you can embed in a Mediawiki  
page: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:HTML_in_wikitext>

> Even though it's a bit verbose, I wouldn't mind having to enter [X]
> HTML, although the big problem with that is that there is no extra
> indirection with URLs, so you have to be careful with them.
>
> The web space we have on GNA supports server side includes, so it
> would be relatively easy to use this directly if we had a set of
> template pages and a set of banner includes (e.g. header, footer,
> sidebar).  To make a new page, you'd just copy one of the templates
> and link to it.

This solution is the one used by GNUstep website. In the past, I made  
minor updates to GNUstep website with this setup. In my experience,  
it was really not practical at all. Making a simple update is really  
time consuming in this setup when you compare it to a wiki, that's  
why I quickly forgot about fixing GNUstep website issues I  
encounter :-/ It convinced me of the importance to use a wiki-like  
solution for Étoilé website. However it's true a wiki-only solution  
suffers from many problems.

> I think part of the problem with the current layout is that it's very
> easy with MediaWiki to create new pages, leading to a lot of sprawl.

Well, you are probably right. If we add some basic rules for website  
editing and we appoint someone to be in charge of the website  
organization/navigation, it should solve the problem.

>>  - We need good, recent documentation in an easily searchable/
>> browsable format
>
> I would like every svn commit to be accompanied by an automatic make
> of the documentation on the server.  This would be possible with the
> svn commit hooks if we ran our own svn server (which I don't
> suggest), but is harder with GNA.  I've filed a feature request with
> GNA.  Another option is to use the downloads area to host the
> documentation (e.g. http://download.gna.org/etoile/etoile.html).  We
> can upload to this using rsync, rather than svn, which makes it a lot
> easier to automate.

I think putting documentation in GNA download area as suggested by  
Yen-Ju is the way to go.

> If we added a target to etoile.make that would
> set the document install directory to a temporary location, make and
> install the documentation there, and then rsync it to the server,
> that would probably be helpful.

Sounds right.

We should just take care of avoiding any upload when the  
documentation generation fails. We should also keep latest release  
documentation separated from -trunk (or -stable) documentation.

>> I know most people are comfortable with Mediawiki based on
>> conversations we've had before, but I'm wondering if using
>> something else wouldn't be better. In the past I've proposed
>> WordPress, but Drupal looks like it might be a good long-term
>> solution also/instead. I'm wondering if anyone has any other
>> suggestions about what to do with the site, or if there are any
>> major objections to moving to something drastically different in
>> the process of building 0.3.
>
> After 0.2, we used something like 50GB of bandwidth in three days.
> Hopefully 0.3 will be even more popular, and so anything that
> involves none of us having to pay for that seems like a good
> solution.  I would advocate putting as much of the site on GNA as
> possible.

Makes sense as long as it doesn't prevent easy and quick edition of  
web pages.

> Use the website area in svn with SSI for the main pages,
> and the download area for automatically-generated documentation.  I'm
> not sure what to suggest for the blog.  I found a support item from
> 2004 saying GNA planned on supporting PHP 'soon,' but as of 2007 they
> still don't.  They do support Apache SSI, which apparently allows the
> running of external programs, but I'm not entirely sure how one would
> go about using this.  Without this, allowing comments is quite hard.

If I don't have to resort to svn and [X]HTML editing (except for the  
front page and may be three or four additional pages), I'm fine with  
any solutions that provides a simplified markup (like wiki, ReST  
etc.). The best would be a solution which supports:
- both a wiki-like markup and some [X]HTML subset (as Mediawiki does)
- editing pages directly inside the webrowser (as Mediawiki does) and  
also outside of it with a text editor.

>> Home                         etoile-project.org
>> - News                               /news (blogs, press, feeds)
>
> I like these sub-categories.  We should try to keep a clear
> distinction between blogs (what developers are saying) and news (what
> the project is saying officially).

Agreed.

>> - For Developers             /dev -> dev.etoile-project.org
>>    - Getting Started         dev.etoile-project.org/start
>>    - Installation            dev.etoile-project.org/install
>
> These two are definitely needed.  Currently we have more accurate
> information on the blog than on the main site for installing.

If this is the case, INSTALL document which is referenced on the  
website should be updated.

>>    - Documentation           dev.etoile-project.org/docs (needs to allow for
>> user comments)
>
> We can automatically generate PDF and HTML documentation for
> frameworks, and I suggest we start doing that and putting it online
> soon.  Any insufficiently documented framework should be treated as a
> bug for the 0.3 release.

I agree, well at least for all frameworks which are here to stay and  
won't be deprecated anytime soon.

> Two things I would say are missing:
>
> - FAQ.
>       We want a quick reference to questions like 'are you trying to clone
> OS X'

This should be the first one in the FAQ :-D

> - People
>       It might just be me, but I find it easier to trust a Free Software
> project if people are willing to put their names to it.  Having
> faceless developers makes it much harder to relate to the project.
> We have something like this on the current site, but it's quite well
> hidden.

Agreed. However 'People' page is linked on the front page. The link  
is called Developers. I would be in favor of renaming it 'Team' to  
make its intent more obvious.

Cheers,
Quentin.


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