Website Improvement Ideas

[Justin C. Sherrill]

On Sun, April 20, 2008 9:47 pm, Christopher Rawnsley wrote:

> It sounds as if this has already been discussed. Can you share why PHP
> is undesirable and Perl is more (for that is what I am lead to believe
> that Movable Type is written in)? Also, i am curious as to why you
> switched away from MT in the first place?

PHP has had a history of poor code and security issues.  It's gotten a bad
reputation for that; the idea of anything PHP-based within
dragonflybsd.org was shot down when I suggested it.  I'm assuming Perl
would fare better.

I switched away from Movable Type because at the time, the licensing was
unclear, and WordPress had a nicer editor and spamfilter (Akismet).  I was
losing a lot of time on the manual editing and clearing of spam.  I'd have
to re-evaluate; the Movable Type license is clearer now and it's worth
checking how the features compare.

> I think this is good direction to go. It should make it feel like a
> more accessible community if users get to hear the voice of developers.

I'm curious how many developers for DragonFly would want to write posts
for the Digest, though.  I occasionally get suggestions from folks, but
it's not something most people like to do regularly.

> I agree that setting up a wiki for the whole site does make things
> easier. I have done it in the past and it has worked well. I think the
> main gripe about the current wiki here is that it has no clear
> navigation. It is very much a wiki rather than a functional website. i
> don't know how flexible MoinMoin is but hopefully that can be changed
> easily so that all the good content on there can be found quicker.

I don't like MoinMoin very much; it falls somewhat into the trap of
assuming that since it was written by people who like Python that you want
to be hacking on Python to make it work.  I like Python, but I want a wiki
that works as a tool, not as a hacking exercise.  The only other wiki
software I've used is Mediawiki, which is PHP-based, but I liked some
parts of its feature set more.  I'm open to suggestions, as long as
there's a migration path.

> What parts of .dragonflybsd.org are there? Using NetCraft I found wiki
> and leaf (The naming for "leaf" confuses me) as well as www and nntp.
> "crater" was mentioned there as well though it seems out of action at
> the moment. Are there anymore? I mention this so that information
> avoids getting repeated in multiple locations.

bugs.dragonflybsd.org.  Crater is another name for www.  These are linked
on the main page of the Digest, too.  As long as people can find
www.dragonflybsd.org, they should be fine.

> I have an idea about using man pages and a wiki together. I guess this
> may have been discussed before but just in case it hasn't... I think
> it would be great if we could some how integrate the man pages into a
> wiki like system in order to help keep are documentation as good as
> possible. But this shouldn't just be a one way thing and the
> documentation from the wiki should also be exportable back in to the
> offline man pages in the OS. Thoughts?

This would be interesting, but I don't know if converting wiki markup back
to man page markup (troff?) may be more work than it's worth for the
amount of changes it will encourage.  Sascha is more qualified than I to
comment on this idea.