[OpenAFS] Re: OpenAFS web site design help?

[Franco]

On Aug 30, 2006, at 08:43pm, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> 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...).

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

In first place I don't want to spend too much time on such things,  
that's why the search for a nice looking and easy to use interface is  
important, focusing more on /what/ and not spending hours on how.  
Plone seems to me a easy way to cfm instead of using plain zope.  
Rigth now we have the site running on a linux distro (which one I  
don't know) with apache 1.3, quite old. Bringing up plone on apache 2  
with a debian is quite easy.

> 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.  :)

Well, I will see that :)

Personally, I think OpenAFS needs more than a plain-html site ---  
without frames! --- since we lack of some nice features like an AFS  
user database. Maintaining the cell server database is a good thing:  
who uses openafs, who's the person reposible for the cell, type of  
servers, services based on the cell, any informations about it... And  
of course, the ability of keeping it up-to-date. This is just the  
``advertisement'' point of view :)

My $0.02, I'll give it a try and tell you how painful it would be.  
Anyway I see the CVS->SVN worse than this even though there are  
scripts around, and of course, a good occasion of renewing the site  
with some useful services.

--
Franco Milicchio <milicchio@mac.com>

Research (n.): a discovery already published by a chinese guy one month
                before you, copying a russian who did it in the 60s.