Sorry for the cross-post; lets but wanted to make sure those on the zope-web list saw this. Lets keep this on the zope list going forward.
For sometime, we have tried to coordinate various numbers of people in the community to get an improved Zope.org up and functional. Some of this improvement was through the 'visual' look and feel of the site and the other was by cleaning up what has been often thought as unmaintainable code as well as reducing the content scope of Zope.org. During this time, it was largely agreed that the zope.org site would highlight ZOPE the technology, Documentation, the products found in the Zope Code Repository, and highlight the community, to offload features which people had previously relied on zope.org for in the past. The current zope.org site would remain available for some time while a (tedious) and manual migration of content deemed beneficial would be placed on the new site. To the best of my knowledge, this is still agreed on by all those who over the months participated in countless #zope-web irc chats and discussions on the mailing lists. It then came to technology. Some cared some didn't. I personally didn't if the result was something which the community could be proud of and not make excuses for as they directed people to the site. This caused some stalling of the momentum. We had many ideas, some text which is in svn at codespeak, and artisitic work being done. Geoff Davis contacted me with a proposal which would get this move started and has offered resources to accomplish this to finally happen. They currently have taken the artistic work done by Tom Von Lahndorff and put it online at http://new.zope.nl for preview. I'd like to forward Geoff's proposal to the list, now that the Zope Foundation is setup to act on this generous offer by members of the community. I'd like to see this get blessed so we can move forward and finally get a site which has a focused scope and is something the community can be proud of. I have done some minor editorial changes to reflect discussions back and forth since the initial offering. A group of people in the (Plone) community have volunteered their time and resources to put together an improved, **interim** zope.org site. We understand that work is underway on a longer-term zope.org solution -- the current initiative is not intended to replace this longer-term work; rather, the goal is to improve upon the existing zope.org site until something better is put together. I am appending a sketch of the vision and would like very much to hear your feedback. Geoff Maintenance and Administration ------------------------------ A number of people have expressed concerns about the maintenance of zope.org going forward. We share those concerns! A central goal in setting this site up is to make maintenance as painless as possible. Toward that end, we envision doing the following: * The zope.org site will be set up with the same software that runs plone.org. The sites will have different skins, of course, and will be configured a bit differently, but the underlying software will be the same. * The products on the site will all be off-the-shelf products that have an active community of developers. The current likely candidates: PlonePAS + LDAP for site management authentication, PloneHelpCenter for documentation, and PloneSoftwareCenter for software distribution. For bug tracking, either links to the existing ZC trackers or a Trac installation. * plone.org and zope.org software updates will be done at the same time and by the same people. The more similar the code/products are, the simpler it will be to update them in parallel. The Plone community will manage upgrades of the off-the- shelf code. However, if people decide to customize the code on the zope.org site, those people will then be responsible for ensuring its continued functionality during upgrades. This should be discouraged without valid requirements someone is willing to 'pay' for, either with $ or labor. * zope.org will have a paid sysadmin. Bas van der Linden of Amaze has volunteered the services of Wichert Akkerman, the very talented sysadmin who currently administers plone.org. * zope.org will be hosted outside of ZC's servers. I believe Bas has lined up a suitable box similar to the one that runs plone.org (dual P4-class processors, lots of memory). Content ------- * Volunteers from the Zope community will be responsible for the site's content. The current mock-up uses a skin designed by Tom Von Lahndorff. I imagine that the initial text and information architecture will come from the svn repository of content that Andrew Sawyers and others have been working on. See http://new.zope.nl for an initial a mock-up. The existing concept of membership for uploading bit-rot content will be retired. * Existing community content on zope.org will NOT be migrated. The content will be made available on ZC's existing server via URL rewriting (to keep existing links from breaking) or by moving everything to an old.zope.org domain. The best content will be migrated by hand to PloneHelpCenter / PloneSoftwareCenter products. * The zope.org site should acknowledge contributors in a overt fashion. "Zope Rock Stars" who have risen up above the call of duty, contributors, etc should be noted. The Foundation can determine how to implement this, but those paying for and providing services should receive acknowledgment. Please discuss this and present your views for the Foundation. Now that they have a board they can decide how to proceed. I would like to thank all the hard work of those who have tried to see this through. Thanks, Andrew Sawyers _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
