[ros-web] What to do?

[Michael Jacobsen]

Freeworld (Michael Wirth) wrote:

> Yes, I agree with that. This could replace Splash or be an addition to 
> it (either one news page for all news or Splash for mailing list 
> summary and the general newspage with a reporter that gives overall 
> progress update and infos). I think this could be done by someone else 
> than us. There plenty of people that would like to help us but can not 
> program. Shouldn't be a problem to find someone. (If you're interested 
> -> send us an email.)

I would like to see this co-exist with Splash. These news articles would 
be more along the 'day to day' sector. Splash is somewhat of a top-down 
view of what's going on with the ReactOS Project. You could even go as 
far as to make Splash a compilation of the 'best' of the news articles 
for the past, say, week or month. But the news articles would be updated 
on at least a bi-weekly basis. One of the big downfalls of ReactOS.com 
at the moment is that practically nothing visibly changes most weeks. 
This says to people 'we're moving slow'. Start updating the site twice a 
week or more and people will sit up and say, "This thing is going 
somewhere!" Blogs, News Aricles. These generate 'buzz' in the greater 
community. We want that buzz. That's what draws developers of all types.

> I think phpBB is a good decision. I like the many options phpBB has 
> and I'm looking forward to the options it will become in the near 
> future. I don't see the speed problem. phpBB will be optimised in the 
> future and otherwise we can do optimization. Further I'm working on a 
> bounty system for phpBB at the moment and it is almost finished.

I hope you didn't feel I was trying to disparage your work with phpBB. 
It's a spectacular system. It blows the old forums out of the water. 
Part of my purpose in pointing out PunBB was for the 'take a look' 
factor. (Kinda like 'spread the pain' seeing as I've been reading 
whitepapers and spec-sheets of CMS systems for over a week now.)  I 
wanted to show you how nimble a forum system can be, while still having 
a fairly hefty feature set.

> The ReactOS Foundation page will be a different site like the user 
> site or the developer site.

That's cool, however we will still need some FAQ's and general 
information on the main site. Even if it ends up being one or two 
paragraphs and a link to the ROS Foundation page.

> I don't think that this needs an RSS Feed. I would like to have the 
> 'nightly' builds on our site and not spreaded over many other sites. 
> This is one of my main goals for the new site.

What I was actually meaning here is every time we have a 'non-nightly 
build' release there should be a News Article about it. That way people 
who use RSS readers to see what's going on with us at the moment will 
see information about the new release.

> Perhaps we could make a script that turns the dynamic pages that 
> aren't really dynamic into static htmls. So we could handle much more 
> traffic. 

Most modern CMS systems with good Caching support (Newer versions of 
ezPublish and Drupal come into mind.) can cache pages to the point where 
the system virtually 'will' be pumping out static pages. Our present 
ezPublish system is somewhat old, back when it's caching support was 
more than a bit crude. That's why things seem to lag a bit.

> I don't like ezPublish at all but if you can show me that there is no 
> need for a change I will not be stolid. What I also hate is the 
> license and that you have to pay for every good feature (WYSIWYG 
> editor...) Michael, could you pick up this job and update ezPublish?

In some ways I agree that the ezPublish licensing system is a bit of, 
well, crap. However, I am a firm believer in not tossing the baby out 
with the bathwater on this one yet. EzPublish is a well recognized and 
utilized WebCMS. The only reason I would posit switching from ezPublish 
is if I honestly find that it A) Is not up to the task of what we want 
it to do. B) Is not as good as other OSS solutions out there that do 
what we want to do, easier and better. or C) If I find an all around 
better solution.

Drupal seems to me to be a good system simply based upon the fact that 
it's far more pluggable than ezPublish. By pluggable I mean that you can 
literally install a completely different templating and switch the site 
over to it with just a few mouse clicks. (For someone who's played with 
and used Zope a good bit, the thought of using TAL, in the form of 
PHPTAL, for templating the site is nice.) However, I don't want to give 
you the opinion that Drupal is the end-all-be-all. It's got it's quirks 
and problems too. (Mainly the 'permissions' system in Drupal is fairly 
new and relatively crude and the i18n system I'm still looking at, looks 
a bit rough yet.)

Anyway, that's enough from me for now.

Anyone else out there care to throw in their $0.02

~MJ