[ZWeb] volunteers wanted! zope foundation website as guinea pig

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

It's nearing september, and I'd like to start some work on zope.org, in 
particular www.zope.org/foundation. I'm looking for volunteers to help.

As you all probably know, we have a Zope Foundation, of which I'm a 
board member (representative for the committer members). Aroldo 
Souza-Leite is also on the board as chairman.

Aroldo and I are the board members responsible for the zope.org website 
committee. The task of the zope.org committee is to improve the zope.org 
web presence. Aroldo and I won't be doing the work or decision making 
alone, but since we have the backing of the foundation, we can make 
decisions stick. Volunteers are welcome to join this committee!

One of the first tasks at hand is to improve the presence of the Zope 
Foundation on the web. We currently have a section here:

http://www.zope.org/foundation

This website doesn't look very pretty at all. My proposal is to 
reorganize it, have some introductory text, put in links to relevant 
information resources, such as mailing lists (including this one), and 
to stick a nice layout around it.

This project will serve two purposes:

* to create a nice website for the foundation.

* serve as an example and test case for the wider zope.org renewal project.

So, please help us out.

Layout
------

I propose we use Tom Von Lahndorff's design for the foundation website. 
For the purposes of the foundation site we should strip it down:

* no login necessary

* no search (unless we integrate google-based search, perhaps)

* possibly no drop-down menus at the top. We could simply have links 
there, or possibly a standard left-hand side navigation. This design is 
the top page; we need to see a sub-page design as well.

Tom, are you still there? This time we're going to use what you made 
quickly, if you're willing!

Structure and text
------------------

Aroldo and I (Aroldo, I'm volunteering you :) are willing to work on a 
bunch of restructured text documents that introduce the zope foundation 
and set up the site structure.

Technology
----------

I've said this before, and I'll just repeat it again: let's try to avoid 
technology discussions as much as we can. Most of us, including myself, 
are techies, so it's attractive to do this, but we just want to put a 
website up. This doesn't require any new technology, nor does it require 
a heavy-duty CMS.

To break my own rule on no technology discussions right way:

I propose letting www.zope.org/foundation point to a Apache directory, 
where we maintain HTML files. We will then generate such HTML files from 
restructured text we maintain in the zope SVN repository, using a simple 
script that drives docutils.

If you want examples of websites that are managed this way and I have 
personal experience with, check out the following places on codespeak:

http://codespeak.net/z3/

http://codespeak.net/lxml/

Since we're not aiming for a big site, this should be sufficient technology.

For the larger zope.org, we may need something else, or we may not. 
Let's treat the foundation website as a trial case here too, and see how 
we like it.

There's one alternative to this approach that will also work on the 
short term: a volunteer that's willing to work with zope.org and 
integrate the layout and text and structure we want into existing 
zope.org infrastructure. If someone volunteers to work on this, I'd be 
happy to do it that way as well. Does anyone volunteer?

Any other technological approaches require more setup and I'd like to 
defer them for the time being. We can take them up when we tackle 
zope.org proper.

I hope we can all have this together in a couple of weeks, so let's 
start working!

Regards,

Martijn