[ZWeb] Zope.org and New zope.org status

[Sidnei da Silva]

On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 02:45:03PM -0500, Guido van Rossum wrote:
| Lots of issues to respond to.
| 
| - Volunteers.  I regret that it appears as if offers to volunteer are
|   being ignored.  That's not supposed to happen!!!  Zope.org (old or
|   new) can't work without volunteers.  The volunteers need to be
|   coordinated, and for the NZO transition, that's Sidnei's job.  He
|   has asked for volunteers once, and one was even officially sworn in,
|   but I don't know what happened after that; I haven't heard Sidnei
|   reporting that any volunteers were doing anything.  Maybe Sidnei
|   dropped the ball?  (He spent three weeks in the hospital, which may
|   have had something to do with it.)  Several people have said they
|   would volunteer; to cut things short I suggest that they write again
|   directly to Sidnei (cc'ing me) offering their help.  One thing:
|   before you can get access to the management side of the site, you
|   need to sign a non-disclosure form, because you have access to lots
|   of privacy-sensitive data.  But that shouldn't hold you up more than
|   a day.

I think this one deserves a real good explanation. The NZO project,
negotiated between me & ZC says clearly that the work will be done
by me, which make use or not of volunteers, and would result on a
migration procedure and a mostly working setup with a mostly working
skin for NZO. From this point on, we will have a transition from CZO
to NZO where volunteer work will be essential for success. There are
some reasons for this: 

  - Many people from the community *want* to help, but are often too
  busy to coordinate. Its not easy to coordinate work and keep
  milestones on sight if you never know when your volunteer will be
  available to finish that skin, or fix that bug that is preventing
  you to complete your milestone.

  - The new Zope.org will use lots of software besides Zope. Many
  people helped (and others could help but havent) by fixing those
  pieces of software. Namely, Andy and Kapil, which made the first
  stab at CMFBackTalk and Simon, that made the ZWiki upgrade very
  smooth, added some features from WikiForNow and improved
  CMF-compatibility.

  - The main problem behind Zope.org is not the software, but how
  content is organized. *That* will be the hardest task to be done,
  and thats something that will need consensus. Its not a task for a
  single person. If a script takes around 8 hours to migrate Zope.org,
  I imagine a single person taking from 2-3 years to put Zope.org in
  good shape regarding content. So *thats* where we will need
  volunteers, and *lots* of them. Divide and conquer!

| - Plone.  Whether or not it's compatible with CMF is anybody's guess,
|   but it's certain that Zope Corp couldn't help Sidnei if any
|   Plone-related problems were to crop up.  When we started Sidnei's
|   contract, we discussed this with him and decided not to use Plone.
|   I believe the reasons for that decision still stand, and in any case
|   I don't want to jeopardize the alpha (planned 3 weeks from now!) by
|   switching now.  Once we have the new site up, I'm all for making a
|   plan to improve the look and feel if needed, but our first priority
|   should be to get the new site in production.  Note that we *have* a
|   winning design for a skin (designed by Nicolas from IngeniWeb by the
|   way -- I forgot to mention that last time).

I need to schedule another run of the migration script anyway, so I
will use a Plone site again this time and make the Plone skins + CMF
skins + NZO skin available for choosing. Its just a matter of set your
preferences to see the difference. Plone has a lot of features and all
those features are tied to the Plone skins. If you *dont* use those
features and use the CMF skin instead, its the same thing as using a
CMF site *even though its a Plone site*. But I will not take the
decision alone. I can make a Plone site or a CMF site available in the
same amount of time. No delays or whatever. But Im worried about who
will keep the site working after it goes live.

| - Download mirroring.  The downside of using SourceForge is that it
|   requires explicit synching of selected downloads.  How about setting
|   up a set of community-run mirrors of the zope.org download bits?
|   This could be done as follows: when downloadable contents is
|   uploaded, an extra copy is made to somewhere on the filesystem.  (Or
|   maybe a nightly cronjob hunts through ZODB for downloadable contents
|   and copies it.)  This section of the filesystem is then made
|   available to mirrors through ftp and rsync (I don't know what mirror
|   sites prefer; for python.org, we support both, although rsync seems
|   more modern).  The zope.org webmaster maintains a list of mirror
|   sites, and when you select a file for download, you are offered a
|   menu of links directly to the mirror sites, with their geographical
|   locations.  There needs to be a way to collate download stats from
|   the mirrors, and there needs to be a way to provide feedback on
|   mirrors that are in decay, so the webmaster can remove them from his
|   list.  None of this should be rocket science, and since Sidnei is
|   writing a new product for downloadable content anyway (boy did the
|   old one suck :-( ) it shouldn't be too hard to integrate it in
|   there.

I dont see where this would be integrated with the CMFPackage. Maybe
by making CMFPackage count its own downloads plus a hook for remotely
updating the download counts from the mirrors?


-- 
Sidnei da Silva (dreamcatcher) <sidnei@x3ng.com.br>
X3ng Web Technology <http://www.x3ng.com.br>
GNU/Linux user 257852
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Sid) 2.4.18 ppc

linux: the choice of a GNU generation
(ksh@cis.ufl.edu put this on Tshirts in '93)