On 2004-03-04, Gervase Markham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The www.mozilla.org website is a navigational ball of mud, and we've never got a serious body of contributors working on it. Compared to the sites of many other projects, it sucks. We need to analyse why that is, and avoid making the same mistakes again. I assert CVS is part of the problem - we can argue that, fine, but even if everyone else disagrees with me, we need to learn what our mistakes were to avoid repeating them.
CVS is part of the problem, but I don't think it's the biggest part. Although I've only been around for a short part of the history of it, the problem seems to me to be that the website is managed by hundreds of different people, most of whom have long since gone away, and nobody has both the authority and the time to do anything about it. Each change has to be accompanied by attempts to track down people that don't communicate and/or don't exist, and usually a group debate on the merits of the changes are, who the audience is supposed to be, whose content is best, what the views of someone that isn't communicating might be, and the fact that the system doesn't work and wouldn't Zope have been good.
As an innocent bystander, I agree with Gerv on this; we'd be much better off with a proper CMS that is designed to deal with websites rather than trying to hack CVS into doing the same job. I haven't investigated largescale CMS systems, but perhaps they have features to deal with the editing problem; one could certianly imagine that such systems would provide something like the patch queue in bugzilla, so changes to a page would be queued for approval by the person responsible for maintaining the page. If the CMS handled details like that, trying to track people down in bugzilla/newsgroups/irc in order to make small edits of a document wouldn't be so necessary. It would also be possible to see who was neglecting their pages and assign maintainance of such pages to another person. With the current system, this is rather more complex (at the very least, bugzilla has to be involved, which adds another overhead).
Obviously, designed from-the-ground-up CMS systems will have other advantages too, but I think that providing a transparent system for adding or modifying documents would be a big improvment for people looking to contribute documents.
We also seem to have a large number of people keen to contribute to meta discussion and technical tweaking, and a small number of people actually willing and able to write content.
Yeah, that sounds like me (well, I'm willing to write stuff, but not able...)
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