New Web Pages

[Kevin M Stange]

Okay, I've gotten the pages working properly with IE 7, IE 6, and
everything else (since everything else worked by default).  Please check
out the work in progress and give me feedback! :)

http://pidgin.simguy.net/

Since the pages are pretty much done, if we want to replace what's there
we can probably do so at any time.  Of files currently at pidgin.im, I
need to figure out what must be kept and either check it into MTN or at
least not move it out of the way.  I will probably need some advise here.

It's also time for me to start making some of the "magic" pages work in
some more dynamic ways.  I have in my memory that the following things
need to be done:

1) Javascript detection of platform to display custom download links on
the home page.  Is this something that should also be displayed on the
main downloads page, instead of the list of links (or how do we want
this to work?)

2) The news!  Where is news supposed to appear on the main page?  Right
now, on the current live site, it looks kind of ugly or misplaced.  It
won't fit on the talk bubble the way the images are designed, though I
can probably rework them if needed, though the space available would
still be limited (or face a giant talk bubble).

a) Do we want any kind of CMS, or should we go back to the flat text
file as in Gaim's old home page?  We could store the news in some other
format as well.  I'm trying to decide how best to handle updates.  If we
use a static format, we could have a cron or manual script to run to
rebuild the news pages, since they don't really need to be dynamic.  We
still need to be able to aggregate news feeds from blogs, making dynamic
stuff easier, but heavier on resources, so some kind of static idea
might be worth considering.

b) What is the page structure we want for the news section?  Should
there be "news" and "blogs" as there are now?  Should the default page
be "latest news" and contain only news, and not blogs, or what?

c) We can certainly aggregate content from other places by RSS or
otherwise, but what RSS feeds should we provide to visitors?  What items
should they contain and how/where should they be able to reach them?  I
can put a tag on the whole site which references a main rss feed so
browsers find it automatically.

3) The donations page(s)!  Where does this page even go?  How will it
work?  Does this need to be registration-based?  If so, could it tie
into trac accounts to make things less complicated?

Let me know if I missed anything!

Kevin

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