[Actionchix] The former website effort: an apology to Jen and Gloria

[Gloria W]

Wow, Mary, I am impressed with your powers of event recall, and the 
effort you put into making things right. Kudos.

I never got sudo access to the server, so I could not go further. I 
wasn't sure why that happened, but I was too busy to put huge effort 
into it back then. I know Jen was even busier than I was, and yet she 
found the time to do the compile/install and configuration. Hats off to 
Jen for doing that, and I understand why she is offended. I was not so 
offended, because I did not have the time back then to latch onto that 
project to understand why it was not succeeding, etc. 

I have to admit, I was not a Plone fan anyway, and almost expected to 
hit an impasse with that tool sooner or later. The fact that it happened 
sooner is, in my opinion, a good thing. At my day job, we've hit that 
impasse after months of DTML implementation, which cannot be reused 
anywhere else. I learned ZPT, but found it to be ugly, so we decided not 
to continue further with Zope. The Zope/Plone model was good in it's 
day, but it is too restrictive in it's template languages, db 
interfaces, it's levels of security and redirection, and skin 
configuration. I think it's time has passed, although I am thankful that 
it helped make Python as mainstream as it is now. I know Jen is a Ruby 
expert, and Plone was not her first choice either.

Back then, Jen and I discussed tying Postgresql into the Plone back end, 
for form data storage/retrieval, mailing lists, etc. Jen thought it was 
a good idea, and I trust her expertise. So this may still be useful with 
the current prototype.
I am entirely freelance now, and I can and do work from anywhere. So I 
can and will make the time, if you want to consider using Postgresql 
with Drupal, and you need help with setup, db templates and config, etc.

Jen, if you're reading this, please write when you have a moment, and 
let me know what you're doing right now, and I'll do the same. I want to 
know if you want to do some freelance work with me in the near future 8)

Gloria
> On Mon, Mar 12, 2007, Mary Gardiner wrote:
>   
>> Essentially there hasn't been any progress for six months or so. This is
>> partly my fault and partly a group failing I think.
>>     
>
> Jen-Mei Wu has rightfully asked for a fuller version of events and an
> apology from me regarding this.
>
> Firstly, the apology: I apologise to Jen and Gloria for implying that
> they failed in any way in their part of developing a Plone replacement
> for www.linuxchix.org. As shown below, they did a successful Plone
> install fairly quickly, and the project failed after that point, almost
> entirely due to a misunderstanding on my part.
>
> Here's a fuller version of events:
>
> We had decided to installed Plone and I asked for updates on Aug 26 and
> Sep 4:
>  1. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-August/000474.html
>  2. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000478.html
>
> Jen and Gloria replied both times and Jen reported that Plone had been
> installed by Sep 5:
>  3. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000481.html
>
> There was then some genuine confusion on my part about how accessible
> the site was.  Had I read the above message properly (and I did not, in
> fact, do so until just now), I would have realised that the Plone
> install was publicly accessible already. However, there was some
> discussion about it becoming accessible at http://test.linuxchix.org/:
>
>  4. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000482.html
>  5. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-September/000484.html
>
> In message 5 above, Jen suggested having a 'secret' virtual host listed
> only in people's /etc/hosts files. This was where I got stuck, as I
> reported on Oct 7, because I have a transparent proxy between me and the
> Internet, and changes to my /etc/hosts don't help me connect to remote
> sites:
>  6. http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/2006-October/000485.html
>
> This seems to be where things ended. Not remembering that I could access
> it via the alternative URL in message 3 above, and not getting any
> replies to message 6, I thought that I couldn't access it at all until
> such time as Dancer put test.linuxchix.org in the linuxchix.org DNS. I
> asked Dancer for this off-list but got no reply.
>
> I actually recall asking about this more times than I seem to have. I
> don't know why I found this small impasse insurmountable, but I did. I
> genuinely believed I couldn't access the site, and did not know what to
> do from there, especially as the list died down.
>
> -Mary
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