> These kinds of proposals would be much more successful if Alex were able to come to the mailing list with a fully functioning demo using live data that could be commented on and iterated on by the community. See this: > - a complete redesign that never got launched (11-2009): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pygame-mirror-on-google-groups/rUC5CrroA3U/TzWTWL5cFOUJ There was an approach like this. As the site maintainers didn't like the site, it never got launched, that's why I didn't come up with a solution. Although I might do some prototypical views.
> Pygame needs a site where a community can form around and share our works (like right now!), and where new people can understand how to get going and discover Pygame at their speed, using the OS that happens to be in front of them. On that last point, I speak for kids who want to make games and who don’t get a choice of their OS, in contrast to us adult engineers. I agree, that's the main reason why I want a page redesign. Of course it's nice to have a good looking website, but what's *always *more important than appearance is content and ease of use. As an experienced dev you can handle poorly designed websites and still find what you are looking for (mostly), but a beginner (children / young students) will just be like: "screw it, then I'll just go back doing whatever". So I really feel the need to make the site "child-friendly" (why not just do a second site for that? --> read below). Nevertheless as a designer I got a fable for good-looking aesthetics. > leave the old pygame site alone and build any amount of new ones. We will all visit everyone according to our need. Aren't there hundreds of Python sites? Yes, there are hundreds of Python sites, but often they got different topics to talk about. We are talking about a website for (more-or-less) a Python-library. I think if we had many sites that (in the worst case) are fighting a tough SEO battle about who is the better site, it will lead to more confusion than we already got with the single site. Even worse if these two sites offer similar functionality. > My question to you is, why does the Pygame website have to be built from scratch as a custom solution? In the head description of the form I state: > Whether the old site is updated or we do a complete redesign, how hard it will be to port the old data and who will maintain it is not important in this first step. Sorry that I didn't mention this in my post, I don't think that it is impossible to gradually improve the old site, but to know if it's possible we need to know, what needs to be improved. After that, I can talk to the site owners if the desired features can be implemented by improvement, or if we need a completely new site. By the way: illumine stated (first link in my post): > The current website is made with PHP and some website technology made by Phil which he used to make dozens of websites professionaly. This is what Phil chose to use as the website maintainer in early 2005. > [..] This time we decided it would be better to do it in python, and also have a team of website maintainers. Since not so many pygame developers people know PHP, and that has meant that it's been a bit difficult for us to make changes... we had to bother Phil mostly to change things. And at the moment 75% want to have a python based backend, so *at the moment* the chances are high, that a new (better) site should have a new backend.
