[ZWeb] Zope.org - take 3?

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 10:23:38AM +0000, Chris Withers wrote:
> I would be happy to head up this effort, and I'm prepared to commit 1 
> day a week for both February and March to working on Zope.org and 
> managing the effort of those prepared to help. All I ask in return would 
> be authority from someone who can grant it to yes/no things that I'm 
> helping with (to avoid endless discussions that go nowhere) and the 
> right to produce a case study of the project for my company's website. 
> Who's in a positon to say yes or no to these requests?

not I.  I have no objection in principle to the idea of a small
working group.  Unfortunately I'm overcommitted and I'm thinking
of quitting this list as I've had zero positive contributions
to it in recent memory :-(
I wasn't going to respond to this thread, but hey, you insisted ;-)

> 3. Totally focussed on software, NOT content.

+1
 
> 4. Aim at building the site with as simply as possible, using no fancy 
> new software, and sticking to the absolute bare minimum to make it work 
> fast. If fanciness is needed, let it be in error reporting and site 
> logging domain, rather than "cool new features".

dunno what you mean. Do you think zope.org has too many features?
 
> 5. Have an SVN checkout of the instance home of the storage server and 
> each of the app clients (the client would probably be branched off a 
> common base, with only the config files being different) so that people 
> can checkout the software on a local machine and develop stuff using the 
> usual branch-and-merge model.

somehow i thought that something like this existed
already, but I don't recall hte specifics.
 
> 6. Enable all "system" software (eg: python, zope, cmf) to be easily 
> upgraded as needed, so the latest bugfixes can be used as soon as possbible.

+1, but I'd be wary of upgrading too eagerly unless the intention
is for zope.org to serve as a dogbowl.
Consider e.g. the recently reported problems with AccessControl under 
zope 2.7.4.
 
> 7. (maybe) a functional test suite that actually tests all the 
> functional aspects we're aiming to support. Does anyone have lots of 
> experience producing functional test suites?

not me, but ZopeTestCase should help.

If resources allowed me to devote time to this,
I would bump this up from "maybe" to "definitely" and do it first 
before changing anything.
 
-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com