Subject: Re: [vserver] Call to arms
From: Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:22:16 +0000

Hi

>> This might be a bit premature, but while the iron is hot and all that:
>>
>> 1) Is there any web designer capacity here?  Imagine for a moment 
>> that we want 1-2 websites - who can style and theme these?
>
> Let's keep things simple...eye candy is not necessary, IMHO. Just need 
> to ensure the format and navigation structure of the website is usable 
> and easy to find.

I think eye candy *is* necessary for the 5-10 pages that the typical 
customer stumbles on.  Amazon and Yahoo spend quite a bit of time on 
making the front page look good. 

After the front few pages the rest is way less important though and 
personally I think the choice of wiki engine really isn't an issue...  
To my eye they all look roughly the same...



>> 2) Website engine.  Anyone here got any experience of web engines 
>> which can work as the "front of house" site?  Michael has offered 
>> TikiWiki (but I'm not sure if that's necessarily the only option for 
>> the front pages).  Other popular engines seem to be Joomla or 
>> wordpress?  Anyone offer the resources to manage the setup of a new 
>> front site for vserver?
>
> Foswiki may be suitable. Since it can be a mix of both wiki and CMS 
> together.


I *really* think that unless someone can pull through the entire 
migration to a new engine that this is an unnecessary change.  The first 
few pages can either be done in the current wiki, or using a separate 
engine. 

I don't really mind if someone wants to migrate the existing wiki to 
some other engine, but I do think it's a *massive* undertaking and 
shouldn't be undertaken without a clear opinion that it adds some 
benefits.  I would imagine 2-4 weeks full time work to complete it as a 
finger in the air estimate...

I really don't want to put anyone off doing something positive, but do 
please keep in mind that

a) The current site is *excellent* for "reference" material
b) distinguish this from quickstart and "how do I...?" type 
documentation which is more user and functional orientated.  Actually 
there is already quite a bit of this, but it's not quite brought 
together in a "handbook" yet
c) the front of the website is normally "flashy" - this is frequently a 
separate site or engine for many websites

(In fact most websites I see use one engine for forums, another for main 
content, another for documentation, etc - please don't feel that we need 
to re-engineer the bits that we already have (good documentation) when 
it's the bits that we *don't have* that we need to create from scratch)

Ed W