Xfce.org main website [was Re: Xfce Goodies Project enhancements]

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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On 11/3/2005 11:19 AM, Auke Kok wrote:
> 
> FOgive me for intruding in the discussion, I think I have some 
> experience with it and would like to share that with you all ;^)
> 
> Biju Chacko wrote:
> 
> 
>>Francois Le Clainche wrote:
>> 
>>
>>
>>>Ok. Let's finally do something for xfce.org. I'm ready to work with
>>>other people on a new main website.
>>>
>>>- drupal or mambo based, I don't care, as long as it can be easily
>>> updated by all developers
>>>
>>>- I think we should drop multi-language support
>>
>>As long as it doesn't cost us anything, I'd say we should keep it. 
>>Drupal, et al have good multilanguage support. If we keep multilangauge 
>>support for only the relatively static parts of the website, it 
>>shouldn't be too much of a maintainence hassle, I hope. You'd have more 
>>experience than I on this.
>>
>>>What's the state of directory.xfce.org? Shouldn't we integrate
>>>directory/goodies/main website in a single entity? One website for all
>>>the code available in the xfce svn repository?
>>
>>I agree. The Xfce community is growing ... Xfce.org needs to be a 
>>gateway to all the different sub-projects as well as the home page for 
>>the Desktop Environment.
>>
>>>What Auke did for lunar-linux.org is the example to follow.
>>>Too many resources hides the information.
>  
> yes and no, many things can be said about drupal, the old 
> lunar-linux.org website, and even the way the current xfce website is 
> setup.
> 
> If I may spot the biggest problems right now with xfce, then they would be:
> 
> 1 - the documentation points to an outside webpage
> 2 - the xfcewiki is obsolete, it should be the documentation (which 
> should be a wiki anyway) (and it's also offsite again)
> 3 - the directory site is not progressing
> 4 - the goodies website is also offsite mocha

Agree.

> however, the current site setup has a few large advantages
> 
> a - simple, secure and fast code
> b - clear layout and navigation back to all other components through the 
> top-bar

Agree again ^_^.

> concluding, I would try to solve the problems first before tossing the 
> baby out with the bathwater (a dutch expression - meaning you throw away 
> something which can be brilliant before it has the chance of proving 
> itself).

Really?  I thought it was pretty universal.  At least, I've been hearing
this expression since I was a kid.  It's really more of a warning of the
folly of trashing an entire thing instead of selectively removing or
fixing problems.  If the water is the problem, throw out the water, not
the entire package, losing the baby as well.  (The irony of using this
particular saying considering Francois' new baby is not lost on me.)

> On top of that, I think that with some of the style-designers out there 
> it's much more fun to tweak the xfce.org look design (it needs a 
> freshening up IMO) and try to apply it to all components.

Yeah.  The current design is great, but it's always fun to do some
tweaking every now and then.

> The wiki 
> should follow this design closely IMO, and we should move the wiki and 
> the goodies pages onto mocha ASAP - we have the power and bandwidth for 
> it, so use it.

Definitely.

> (can even do this for the forum if needed, although I 
> prefer to keep that one offsite for security reasons for now).

Ohhhhhh yeah.  If we do move to Drupal at some point, it does have a
forum module, and I have experience importing phpBB forum data into
Drupal (it's somewhat icky, but it can be done).

> Switching to drupal/mambo/something else can be done later at any stage, 
> but will result in a loss of enthusiastic people working on the site I 
> think - I don't think neither CMS's are well equipped for such a large 
> setup as xfce needs.

The one thing that pisses me off about Drupal is that they pretty much
assume that you want your front page to be a news page and nothing else.
 It's a bit of a pain to put other content on it that doesn't appear on
other pages.

> Again - I don't see the need to do all this - keeping up style 
> throughout xfce pages and making navigation clear works much better, and 
> (like now) it allows you to delegate whole subsites to enthusiastic 
> people (like the forum and wiki, relatively or even very succesfull 
> maintained).

Yeah.  I think part of the problem is that everyone has their own
theming system (sometimes by choice, sometimes not) - xfce.org,
bugzilla.xfce.org, blog.xfce.org to name a few.  And the way to achieve
the look is different as well - xfce.org and blog.xfce.org use tables
for the top banner, but when I ported the theme to Bugzilla's format, I
used CSS-positioned <div>s instead.  If we have one canonical set of
theme header/footer files (or whatever), it would be easier to keep all
the different sites with the same look.  I prefer CSS, but whatever
works.  Right now some of them have different borders, spacing, sizing,
etc. on the top bars, which looks really bad to me.

Anyway, I'm just babbling.  Let our fearless webmaster do whatever he
thinks is best ^_^.

	-brian

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