[Foresight-distro] Web Site Revamp

[Paul Cutler]

I was supposed to send this email earlier in the week, but forgot.

The short story is, a few of us were chatting in IRC last Sunday
regarding the web efforts, including:

* Website re-launch plan
* Planet
* Forums
* Wordpress-Multi-User
* Official Foresight blog
* Documenting all of this

And last, but definitely not least, the timing of this all.

First, I'd like to thank Antonio (aka doniphon) for hosting the web
server, and Ken and Jonathan Smith restarting Django whenever it
crashes, and to Thilo and everyone else who keeps the content fresh.
And lastly, to Pscott for always monitoring the forums.

I know a number of the above list are already in progress, so I
thought we might have a brief discussion via email, and then I'll
volunteer to create a Wiki page to document some of this.

I'd like to this email to try and capture two things:

1. Are we aligned and informed about the current efforts?
2. Do we have project leads / volunteers for some of these tasks?

In no particular order:

1.  What are everyone's thoughts around the website relaunch?  Ken has
started the revamp (http://hg.foresightlinux.org/hg/website/) for a
number of different reasons, including:

* Ease of translation
* Ease of updating
* Django keeps crashing and needs to be restarted
* No record of changes when we modify a page with Django today
(I know I'm missing some others)

Ken, what help do you need with the current work in the mercurial repo?

2.  Once we replace Django, do we have or need a Planet appliance?  I
saw a Planet package in Rpath:contrib, but not a project or appliance.

3.  Pscott has played around with Simple Machines Forum - we need to
make a decision between SMF and phpBB for new forums.  Opinions?  Any
volunteers on theming?  There are two appliances for SMF, this one
looks more active:  http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/project/smf/

4. We've been talking about the ability to host blogs for developers /
contributors who might not have one.  I've been playing with Wordpress
Multi-User the last couple of months, and I believe it will fit our
needs.   (Anyone else notice that blogs.gnome.org migrated to WPMU
this week?)  The WPMU appliance on rBuilder should work fine, we just
need to remove one file (wp-signup.php) so it's not the default page
and you can't sign up by yourself.  I will volunteer to maintain
blogs.foresightlinux.org and create accounts for folks who want an
account.

Secondly, with WPMU, we can set it up to have a default blog showing
when you go the domain (blogs.foresightlinux.org).  I could use some
help with theming if a volunteer would like to step forward. This
Foresight blog could be used for posting news, such as release notes,
the newsletter if we choose, etc.

5.  And the most important question:  Timing

Do we want to be ambitious and tie these together in to one project,
with each one a sub-project, and try to launch them together?  Do we
want to try and launch a new website with the upcoming 2.0 release?

I contributed a little bit to the gnome.org relaunch, and that still
isn't live, so I have concerns in the back of my head about biting off
more than we can chew, but there has been a lot of chatter over this,
so I think there is more than just a general interest.  And more
imporantly, any volunteers for the above tasks?  I know a lot of
folk's time and energy is focused on the upcoming 2.0 release, so the
more help we can get, the better!

Thanks for reading this long email, and I look forward to hearing
everyone's thoughts.

Paul Cutler
pcutler at foresightlinux.org