[Zope-dev] Re: Let's fix the damned website

[Martin Aspeli]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
>>  I disagree. Very much. Note that we are not forcing everyone to use this
>>  new site; it is perfectly possible for projects to setup their own site.
> 
> And in that case we end up with two sites, one on Zope.org, and it's
> own, as with Grok. That is very bad.

That's not the intention.

zope.org has a "projects" section where we demonstrate the things that 
are "Zope-related". That's a pre-requisite for being able to answer 
"what is Zope". If we don't have this, we should ditch the idea of 
"Zope" altogether and each go our separate ways.

In the cases where projects (like Grok) want to have their own websites, 
we only give a short overview and then point to a site with more 
information.

In the cases where projects (like Zope 3, Zope 2, CMF and ZODB) don't 
have their own sites, we give them space to maintain some documentation 
and basic information.

> No. Is there a zope.org for these? No, not really. Microsites makes it
> possible to upgrade things one at a time, as necessary, instead of
> creating monumental zope.org upgrade projects that ultimately fail in
> creating a useful zope.org. We've already tried and failed twice. Lets
> learn from that experience.

I'm not terribly worried about upgrades. At least not now. The new 
zope.org site runs a very plain Plone instance. It has one purpose: to 
present some content. I don't want it littered with weird stuff that is 
hard to migrate or update.

The update and maintenance overhead for multiple separate sites with 
separate infrastructures is guaranteed to be greater than the 
infrastructure to maintain a single site.

>>  None of those have
>>  their own site (there are some user-unfriendly wikis but I would not
>>  call those sites) and we should not be asking them to make one.
> 
> Why would this be a difference between microsites and not microsites?
> As far as I can see it doesn't affect who does it or what they do at
> all.


Let me give you a concrete example: Before this effort, apparently, four 
different people had some ZODB information they wanted to publish. All 
four of them are now adding content to zope.org/projects/zodb. None of 
them managed to get a website for the ZODB before. I don't blame them, 
getting a project like this off the ground is very painful.

If these four people one day want to build a microsite, they will be 
more than welcome to, and we can link to it, like we do to 
grok.zope.org. Until they do, I'd rather have their content than put up 
more barriers to contribution.

Martin


-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book