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

[Brenda]

On Thursday 22 March 2007 09:53, jennyw wrote:
> Gloria W wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I was talking to Val the other day and she was mentioning that even
> though the Web site never materialized, there was value in it being a
> learning experience, and I agree.  One lesson learned was that we should
> have aimed lower so we could go live sooner. Our requirements for the
> site included features that eliminated most other CMSes, especially with
> the desire to support multiple languages. We also spent a lot of time
> talking about migration. I think we've learned our lessons well and it
> sounds like the Drupal effort is well under way. Also, it's great that
> content will be added by volunteers instead of trying to convert the old
> content over (especially since a lot of the old content could use a
> rewrite). Also, it sounds like Drupal's i18n support has matured a lot,
> so the old reasons for choosing Plone are probably moot. ;-)
>
> Yeah, I would have loved doing something in Ruby, but it would probably
> have been something from scratch (and there were also comments at the
> time that it didn't support i18n).  As we move forward, I think it would
> be nice to allow other technologies in.  I mean, there's probably a lot
> you could do in Drupal and PHP, but I think it'd make for a more diverse
> and interesting volunteer experience if we could choose to do some parts
> of the site using other things like Python/CherryPy or Ruby/Rails.
> Probably non-essential parts unless we could get a critical mass going.
> We could even mark them Beta. ;-)

I agree with this approach. Linuxchix has a lot of diversity, and the same 
approach in choosing technolgies means we're including more people.

I am heavily biased towards opensource tools - We can come up with useful 
requirements, write the code ourselves, contribute back to the opensource 
projects. Likewise if we find bugs in these tools I will help in the attempt 
to submit patches along with any bug reports we make. 

Building from scratch is a good learning experience -- but taking someone 
else's project (be it drupal, wordpress, moodle, mediawiki, nucleus.. insert 
your fav FOSS web app here)... and then linuxchix contributing back more 
code, will make the world a better place.

The core of the prototype we've set up is drupal. Penny Leach and I had a 
hackfest last weekend and developed a SSO mechanism to integrate with Moodle 
which we then released under GPL. (with some help from Angela Byron)