Websites Tasks - assistance

[Mike McGrath]

On Fri, 28 May 2010, Ian MacGregor wrote:

> Hi all,
>  I am currently working through the Websites Tasks list located here:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Websites/Tasks
>
> It would help me a great deal if everyone would visit this page and see
> if you have any tasks which need to be handled. Yesterday, nb, mchua and
> I were able to complete a few of these tasks and I thank them for their
> help.
>
> My goal is to clear this list of current tasks and I'm willing to work
> on it as long as it takes in order to have all current tasks completed.
>
> nb and mchua gave me some information in #fedora-websites regarding the
> 'CMS solution for Fedora Project websites' item:
>
> ===  IRC snip  ===
> [20:34:52] * mchua sees "CMS solution for Fedora Project websites" and
> goes "oh man, that's a... yeah, that's an epic story there"
> [20:34:59] <mchua> ardchoille: how deep down the rabbit hole do you want
> to get? ;)
> [20:35:38] <ardchoille> mchua: I'm hoping to clear that entire list. I
> know it will take some time, but I;ve nothing else to do and I bet many
> of those are no longer needed
> [20:35:55] <mchua> ardchoille: so, depending on your interests/time...
> one thing we could use a lot of help with (it's been struggling for a
> while) is the "CMS solution for Fedora Project websites" item
> [20:36:36] <mchua> ardchoille: ...which links to a somewhat outdated
> webpage, which is on hold because some other teams are evaluating a CMS
> platform called zikula
> [20:36:51] <mchua> and the plan was for websites to see how that went
> and then if it worked for Docs, Marketing, and News, to just adopt that
> too
> [20:37:01] <mchua> but months later, the status is "wow, zikula is hard"
> [20:37:08] <ardchoille> ah, ok
> [20:37:11] <mchua> the thing we were trying to make work:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight
> [20:38:09] <mchua> and the issue is that it's taken months to try and
> get the last 10% of the features in - zikula upstream has great people,
> but they're tight on time to help
> [20:38:36] <ardchoille> Ok, I'll get with Karsten and see what the
> status is and if there's anything I can do to help
> [20:38:59] <mchua> and the folks on the Fedora side don't have the
> zikula knowledge, nor the time to acquire it given the state of "learn
> zikula!" resources (very few) out there
> [20:39:05] <nb> last thing i saw was they were waiting on packaging?
> [20:39:07] <nb> i think?
> [20:39:10] <nb> or is that all done now?
> [20:39:29] <ardchoille> mchua: Do you think it would be a bad idea to
> ask the ml if everyone would take a look at Websites/Tasks and see if
> they have a task that needs to be changed?
> [20:39:46] <mchua> ardchoille: I think that would be a *very* good thing
> to do, re: Websites/Tasks
> [20:39:53] <ardchoille> yeah, ok, will do
> [20:39:56] <mchua> ardchoille: and for the CMS - I think there are two
> things to look at in parallel
> [20:40:09] <mchua> ardchoille: the first is "does websites still want to
> examine a CMS solution?" which I think is worth asking Karsten and the
> list
> [20:40:39] <mchua> (and if the answer is yes, "do we want to look at
> options other than zikula for it?")
> [20:41:12] <mchua> ardchoille: the second is to look at the zikula
> progress, which is what we said we were going to check out (but it's
> been months, and things have changed since, so questioning that decision
> again is good)
> [20:41:16] <ardchoille> yeah, if zikula is taking too much time, perhaps
> there is something else we can use because we'll still need to maintain
> it
> [20:41:23] <mchua> ardchoille: exactly.
> [20:41:38] <mchua> and the second is checking in on the status of zikula
> - the latest meeting notes are at
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/logistics/2010-May/000548.html
> [20:42:05] <mchua> (from
> http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/logistics/, since
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Insight#Project_status points to the
> logistics list as the mailing list for the project
> [20:42:10] <mchua> which is in fact the case)
> [20:42:40] <mchua> ardchoille: this is very helpful, thank you! you're
> not only being super-helpful with tasks, you're pointing out to us how
> much better the "getting started with websites" path needs to be :)
> ===  IRC snip  ===
>
> I'm actually having fun being a contributor and look forward to working
> with you wonderful folks to help make the Websites group the best it can
> be :)
>

There's two things to consider from where I sit wrt a CMS based website.

1) Does it really change so often and have so many authors that it needs a
CMS?  (this includes translations which, right now, are done in the same
way as the other apps and I think translators like that)

2) You lose redundancy.  Love it or hate it our primary site for data
storage is still unproven.  It's not as unreliable as it was, but it's not
something that makes us sleep well at night.  The thing that's nice about
the current fp.o site is it almost never, if ever, goes down.  There's no
load worries, no single point of failure worries, etc.  *AND* almost the
entire websites team could list the pages.  By that I mean we have a total
view of what is there, it's not a mess like the wiki is.  This makes
planning and design much easier.

I'm not convinced a CMS fedoraproject.org will be helpful and actually
think in the long term it would cause more harm then good.  But having
said that I don't know what all the website plans are and it is certainly
not my call (and shouldn't be).  Just making sure that the discussion
doesn't move from here to "what cms should we use" and instead answers "do
we really need / want one".  Once Insight gets pushed out it'll probably
be easier to just maintain another but like mel said, nothing's ever
easy.... well except the current fp.o website :)

	-Mike