[ros-web] What to do?

[Michael Jacobsen]

After some extensive thinking, here is what I feel the website needs to 
do/be. Bear in mind that this list is based from the perspective of a 
new visitor / slashdot visitor.

- News / Announcements - Prominent on the main page needs to be a 
section for news articles and annoucements. (Complete with a RSS Feed.) 
At first we will have to be the 'news reporters' and write the articles, 
however I feel eventually we will find someone to fill the position of 
'ReactOS Reporter'.

 - Developer Weblogs - There should be a link to the weblogs area for 
our developers. These would be an alternate source of 'news' information 
that the developers themselves write whenever they get the urge. (These 
should also have RSS Feeds only in this case the feeds would be one for 
'All Developer Blogs' and then RSS feeds for specific developers.)

- Community Forums - We have these already. While I like the phpBB 
system, and definately thank Michael Wirth for installing it, I came 
across PunBB ( http://www.punbb.org/ ) while I was evalutating CMS 
sources. Slightly less functional but you would not believe the speed of 
this system. Try it out a bit and you'll see what I mean.

- General Information - A section devoted to things like 'About the 
ReactOS Foundation' or 'What is ReactOS'. This is where our 'public' 
whitepapers and such would be placed. As the heading says, General 
Information that a new visitor would possibly want to know. Also, FAQ's 
could go in here.

- Download Links to the Latest Version - Exactly what it says. We may 
want to put a RSS Feed on this as well. A good question here is, do we 
want to have someone, or something, doing 'nightly' builds for download 
or do we just want to do as we have at present, and just put up the 
major release versions.

Additional Notes:
99% of the traffic to the non-Developer section of the site should not 
require any kind of login. True, the interaction section (read Forums) 
needs an account, but the site itself doesn't, neither does viewing the 
wiki once that comes into play. (I consider the Wiki to be a part of the 
Developer side of the site.)

By having only developers log in, this also speeds up/improves website 
caching on the server side. (Making it so hopefully we will be able to 
handle a /.ing without having the site respond like dried mud.)

Do we need a new CMS to handle all this? No, ezPublish is capable of 
doing it, tho the question of ezPublish is the best for the job is still 
pertinent. There's also the factor that our present installation of 
ezPublish is fairly old and has not been updated in awhile. It could 
very well be that we upgrade to the new version of ezPublish to find 
that it solves all the problems that we've experienced with it in the past.

Towards the end of evalutating alternate CMS' i've been working on a 
site requirement list. Once I get it finished I'll share that with the 
group and we can finish hashing it out. (This list takes a slightly 
different angle than the 'requirement' list as this is just talking 
about what there should be to see and do on the general user website.)

Anyway, thoughts, comments, suggestions?

Michael Jacobsen