[Zope-CMF] [Fwd: Status Update for new people]

Wed, 14 Nov 2001 17:53:47 -0800

Forwarding for info to zope-cmf@zope.org. :-)

Gerv

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Status Update for new people
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 17:50:00 -0800
From: Gervase Markham <gerv@mozilla.org>
Organization: mozilla.org
To: mozilla-reorg@yahoogroups.com

Thank you to everyone who's joined this list in response to Paul's
request for help :-) If you look at the current http://www.mozilla.org ,
you'll see that the status quo could certainly use some improvement. I'm
convinced that Zope and the CMF are the way to go with this. This view
is not unanimous among the Mozilla staff, so it's up to us to convince
them that Zope is the way to go.

The current site is basically plain content checked into a CVS tree,
which a script then pulls and wraps with the mozilla.org sidebar. This
system is not very flexible, and has a high barrier to entry because
people have to download, install and learn how to use CVS, get a CVS
account (which gives them access to the entire tree) and then pull a
large tree. This is OK for some developers, but not for many other
people who want to contribute documentation.

To get an idea of the size of http://www.mozilla.org, see
http://www.mozilla.org/webalizer .  You'll note that, before webalizer
broke on the 4th of October (Dawn is working on fixing that) we were
getting 15 million hits a month.

The current situation is that http://moz.zope.org , our test site, is up
and running on zope.com's cluster. Alex Limi (alex@limi.net) and Alan
Runyan (runyaga@runyaga.com) are installing a CMF skin they wrote,
called Plone, and changing it to produce a new mozilla.org look and feel.

The immediate goal is to get the technical platform in place so we can
fix up (make compliant) a load of content and upload it, so people can
test-drive the site. What still needs to happen is:

- Making Plone the default skin for the site, and adding the mozilla.org
look and feel
- We also need to add, and expose in the Edit Metadata UI, a metadata
item called "Comments", "Notes" or "Sticky Note" for adding notes about
the document such as:
"validated 2001-11-11"
"Need to fix the second section to say more about Project Foo"
or whatever.
- Alan implemented the History interface on the Zope CMF Document type.
We need to expose that in the UI.
- Currently, when you upload a document by FTP, Zope takes the <title>
and a few known <meta> tags and throws away the rest of the <head>. We
need to retain <meta>, <style> and <link> tags, so we can add
page-specific styles for certain pages.

The first and second items are blockers; when they are done, we can
start building the test site from the current content. It's getting past
the current Zope-related issues, and any others that crop up, where we
really need the help - we are Mozilla hackers, not Zope hackers :-) We
have a URL hierarchy all mapped out to fit the new content into - you
can find that at http://moz.zope.org/Members/gerv/uri-structure .

I have no idea who's capable of doing what; I've been relying on Alan
and Alex to direct the work that needs to be done. I'm sure that they
will ask for help on this list as soon as they need it :-)

Gerv