[ZWeb] Zope 2 web site

[Chris Withers]

Hi Geoff,

Geoff Davis wrote:
> Yes, Chris, your great love for Plone is well-documented.  Without knowing
> much about the details, my take is that the current zope.org woes
> represent more of a problem with process than one of software.  After
> all, Plone doesn't maintain itself, nor is Plone code the source of
> problems arising from a mangled Zope migration.

Yup, you've hit the nail on the head. But, Plone has proved itself to 
require more maintenance than its predecessor.

> * The site's functionality should be sufficiently narrowly defined that
> building and maintaining it are straightforward tasks.  I don't think it
> makes sense to try to maintain all the stuff that has built up on the
> existing zope.org site over the years. 

Yes indeed.

> It's fine to keep the old stuff
> around in its present form, 

I've changed my opinion on this over the last year to be inline with 
Jens and Andrew: dump the lot, start again...

> continue to forward port it.  Splitting the site into an actively
> maintained part that focuses on software distribution and documentation
> and a minimally maintained part that continues to serve up the old stuff
> is one way to accomplish this goal.

That's what happened last time, until the old zope.org died a death and 
we lost the whole issue tracker ;-)

> * The site should be built largely with off-the-shelf components. 

Not even. It should be absolute positively minimal, fully documented and 
_everything_ should be svn'ed. Zope.org suffers from having zero people 
with time and inclination to maintain it. That's the real problem here. 
Last time Plone was touted as the silver bullet for that, and we can see 
how well that turned out...

> later would make all of us look better.  PloneHelpCenter and
> PloneSoftwareCenter work well now. 

Honestly, flat html files in Apache would probably work better and be 
easier to maintain...

> * The site should be built with software that is actively maintained
> independently of a zope2.org site. 

I think it should be built off either a default distro of Zope 2 or of 
Zope 3. That said, I think Zope 2.9+ covers both those bases...

Chris

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