[Actionchix] Status of new website

[Gloria W]

Hi Mary, and everyone,

I wanted to be more involved back then, but I was tasked with server 
migrations at my day job, and freelance work at night, and it was a bit 
insane. I am working entirely from home now, mostly on freelance stuff, 
so I do have more time.

I was wondering if we're still determined to use Zope/Plone. Since this 
time, I have migrated our entire company to something called CherryPy, 
and I find it to be more flexible, easier to use, less caching delays, 
no template restrictions, and the list goes on.

I'd be very happy to actually teach it, and give you a very useful, 
functional CherryPy "instance", with basic Postgresql connectivity 
(using both Psycopg and SqlAlchemy), Template directories etc. It is 
designed in such a way that writing and rolling out a new module is very 
easy. I have done all of the authentication and cookie control (which 
can be modified for our needs, but is a very useful generic solution). 
Individual pages simply call one authentication method, and it currently 
either redirects the user to a login page/another page, or allows 
access. So the 'framework' is already laid out, and page writing could 
be divided up amongst a few people and rolled out independently.

I've used this in both my day job and my freelance work with great 
success. All of the code is written in Python, and is well encapsulated, 
so admins can worry about authentication, and web page designers only 
have to worry about page design, someone else could handle the database 
interface, if so desired.

My thoughts back then were, Zope/Plone is intimidating, difficult to 
deal with at times, and may narrow down the help we can enlist. But if 
we give people the opportunity to learn Python, Database interface 
tools, CSS, etc., it would increase this possibility.

Please let me know your thoughts. "What? Are you crazy? " is a common 
response I get to proposing such drastic changes. But a few months 
later, everyone is always happy with the results. Now that I have the 
time, I can commit to regular support and online classes/sessions.

We can start with a code review. if you give me until Friday, I can 
clean up a copy of my framework and put it together for you. I also have 
a CherryPy slide show I have done, outlining the framework.

Thanks for your time,
Gloria



> I'm emailing this because Jen-Mei Wu asked about it on volunteers.
>
> Essentially there hasn't been any progress for six months or so. This is
> partly my fault and partly a group failing I think. My fault for not
> following up as quickly as I usually promised, and not keeping on
> holding people to their commitments, both myself and others. In terms of
> a group problem, there was definitely a slow drop in responses to my
> prodding and questions I mailed here and to Dancer (I never did get to
> access the Plone instance, for example, because the suggested solution
> of putting test.linuxchix.org in /etc/hosts did not work when there was
> a proxy server between me and the linuxchix.org server. I did ask for
> alternative access several times.)
>
> The Australian meeting, due to a couple of miscommunications and also
> due to an accident of timing, mostly ended up being about the Australian
> chapter website rather than the international website, so there is no
> significant progress to report from that.
>
> One person has tentatively volunteered to take over the process, at
> least to the stage of getting a smaller new website ready. This has only
> happened in the last week, and hopefully I can soon (as in, within the
> week) hand this particular project over. It will likely have a smaller
> initial charter (as in, not a complete port of all existing content), as
> the larger charter failed.
>
> -Mary
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