After some heated, but productive discussions last night and today, we relaxed a bit with remote controlled airplanes. One of them has a video camera on it. Just the thing for a bunch of geeks, right. So here is the semi-official group photo:
Of course it ends like this:
Ok, back to discussions now, before we all go home…
Yesterday we decided to setup Joomla, just to see if we could replace our Capacity based main site with it. Plans are to remake the website, with a clearer menu structure, up to date content and a fresh look. And that’s an excellent moment to see if we continue with Capacity or an established CMS. After some sleep I decided to look at it somewhat closer to see what kind of work flow we could setup for Joomla. I immediately found some minor disadvantages which I did not like. Combined with the bad reputation Joomla had with backward compatibility, we decided to look beyond Joomla.
We first brainstormed a bit about the requirements. Roughly we came to the following list, which does not include item we all know every CMS has:
After that I’ve been reading a lot about WordPress. I already know a lot about Joomla due to my normal day job, and have not dealt with a lot of WordPress, especially not for such a big site as we would be starting to use it for. At the end of the afternoon, I came to the conclusion that every point of the list can be done with WordPress. Joomla goes a long way, but the thing that I really don’t like is the lack of backwards compatibility. The transition from 1.0 to 1.5 would have been the last time they broke it. And now they broke their promise and did it again with 1.6. I can not trust their statements about this subject anymore. Next to that the permission structure is a bit weird, for example publishers not being able to hook the content into a menu item, the d-tour you have to take for inserting images, etc. But those are not showstoppers by definition.
In the end we’ve setup both CMS’s and we will experiment for a week or so, to get a better feeling about which one would be best. In this test Drupal has been excluded. We use it for the Dot and several other sites, but the people working with it are not enthusiastic about it. There are others like Typo3, but that has to much capabilities for us. Basically the www.kde.org site consists of static pages only, so we don’t need much out of the CMS for now.
The jury is still out and will be out for a while more and maybe we will decide to rewrite capacity to fit our needs. But personally I’m getting more and more excited about WordPress. I really find it fun to work with, nice documentation, and nice plug-ins like WordPress Super Cache, which allows to basically convert your WordPress site to static HTML page where possible, so it can be cached properly. I’ll be playing with that later I hope.
As Stuart already wrote, this might lower the barrier for contributions because no longer svn or git access is required, while on the other hand we become a bit more flexible for the future.
The first real day started at 9am with food. Then we had a discussion about our framework. We now use Capacity for most of our websites, but it is starting to show its age and we need some new stuff. We talked about it for a while and then I started to think that we are basically building a CMS. And then you wonder why we would not hop on established open source standards like for example Joomla. We decided to evaluate that more for usage for KDE. We already use Drupal for the Dot, but that’s not a very big success, so we might as well evaluate Joomla. Ben Cooksley was quick to set it up and hook it up with identity.kde.org within minutes. We’ll see how that goes the next weeks. Nothing final yet.
After lunch (pizzaaaaaaaaaa) I started working on statistics for the like 50 sites we have running on one server. I’ve made some scripts to automatically add / remove new statistics as soon as we add / remove new sites onto that server. That way it is easy to maintain. This will help us to determine which sites actually receive visitors or not. If they don’t have visitors and the content is dated, there is no reason to keep the website, it will make us look bad. But to determine that you need stats. So we will let that run for the next month or so and see which sites are popular and which might be a candidate for alternative solutions….
In the room there were several discussions about the main www.kde.org website. They evaluated the current website, made notes about how other sites solve stuff and looked at a new menu structure which was thought out at the promo sprint recently. We have quite a good idea how we can fix the current structure, content and site. More to follow soonish.
Anne is very busy with various stuff related to Userbase. The translation system had several bugs, which were squashed and we wondered if the mandatory registration system was a serious barrier for contribution. We decided to open up for anonymous contributions as a test, just to see if that would increase the amount of contributions.
Did I mention the new logo Eugene has made? No? Here it is again:
Ok, arrived safely in Essen. I knew it was an awesome place, but it is even more beautiful than I remembered. When I arrived most of the attendees of the meeting sat in this beautiful garden. The sun was shining and it was great. We just chatted randomly, basically to get to know each other, but sometimes already very much on topic.
We went out to buy meat for the barbeque, only to find out the shop did not had any beef or fish, only pork. Pfff… Weird store. In another shop some chicken was found. Anyhow we barbequed outside in the sun. I even got burned in my neck it seems.
In the evening we started to talk about the enormous amount of subdomains, how we can manage all those websites more structured and providing a more professional face to the outside. Great discussions and outcome, which will be refined later this meeting.
Also, I have been thinking about khelpcenter a bit and discussing it with some people. The main goal should be to make it a *Center* again. A place where people can find integrated docs, userbase content, forum, tips for each app and make it easy for people to share and contribute their experiences and tips. I hope I can discuss this even more the next days and come up with a more detailed proposal.
More tomorrow….
Ingo Malchow and Stuart Jarvis already blogged about it, WebWorld 2011 is starting this Wednesday. There will also be another meeting with a lot of KDE-developers at the same time, so I’m looking forward to the blogging battle that will commence shortly. Up to now, we win :)
WebWorld is intended for developers/web artists, documentators, designers, sysadmins and promo people. By bringing in all those skills under the same roof for a couple of days, we hope we can setup a good plan for the next year or so. The goal is not only to setup a good communication bridge between all of them, but also to see if we can get to the bottom of the current problems of some websites, improve the custom framework we use (see Ingo’s post) and see where we need more resources.
I’m looking forward to the meeting, I’ve missed the PIM-meeting earlier this year (because i’m not doing anything with PIM anymore), so I’m ready for a nice break from the usual daily work routine.
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