[OpenAFS] Re: OpenAFS web site design help?

[Russ Allbery]

Franco <senseiwa@mac.com> writes:

> I have a suggestion to make things a little easier. I've come around
> Zope content management and particularly I was attacted by Plone, a AJAX
> (afaik) CMS.

> It seems promising and quite easy to use, with some add-ons that can
> help in some tasks (users, svn access, mailing lists, search facilities,
> wikis...).

Okay, so, here's my personal feeling about a content-management system for
something like this.  This is just my personal take; others may have other
opinions.

I, and I think the rest of the Gatekeepers are in the same boat, don't
have time to learn a CMS, deploy a CMS, or do the work required to get it
running, nor do the people who have graciously been providing system
administration support for the OpenAFS project.  Setting one up usually
also requires administrative access to the web server on which it would be
running, which poses other challenges.

If we have a dedicated volunteer who wants to do the work of maintaining
the pages, *will stick around for the long haul* (this is very important),
and thinks they can do this most effectively by using one of these
systems, we can probably find a way to integrate that work.  They will,
however, have to find a way to bear nearly all of the implementation
effort and will need to clearly document how everything works.  My major
concern for taking this approach is if we get our pages imported into some
CMS, the person who was interested in it disappears, and none of the other
people who volunteer to work on the web pages know anything about that
CMS, we end up in a really bad place and essentially have to throw away a
bunch of work and start over in a very time-consuming process.

We really can't afford more time-consuming processes.  We are heavily
resource-constrained on a very few people right now.

So... if you want to make a CMS work, I don't think we'd rule this out out
of hand, but the bar is really high.  The advantage of simple HTML is that
anyone can jump in and help and if one volunteer runs out of time another
can take over without a huge amount of difficulty.  If any of us had time
to do comprehensive web site development and design, well, we wouldn't be
asking for volunteers to help.  :)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>