New Web Pages

[Luke Schierer]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007 at 09:33:34AM -0400, Ethan Blanton wrote:
> Kevin M Stange spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > 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/
> 
> Yay!
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean, here; I don't see the harm in
> moving everything that's there out of the way, and just dumping these
> pages in.  We don't want to *destroy* what's there, just yet, but it
> can be shoved aside, I think.

We can trivially move it aside, and drop the new site in place.  This is
uber exciting.

<snip points where I fully agree with Ethan> 

> > 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.
> 
> I think the plan is that the main Pidgin news feed will also be a
> blog, and that the news page will just be a set of aggregators with
> various feeds.  This doesn't need to be particularly dynamic, though;
> there's no reason we can't build the aggregated blogs with some sort
> of cron job.  I think this is what planet.pidgin.im does, actually.

It is what planet.pidgin.im does, and it is, I think, what we want.

<more points where I agree with Ethan> 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I see no reason to aggregate anything from off-site, except for any
> developer blogs which are hosted elsewhere (I think Luke's is, for
> example).

Nathans and mine are both external feeds.  Those, and any other
developer feeds we want (I think Mark has one somewhere?) would be the
extent of any offsite aggregation.

> 
> > 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?
> 
> Pass.  ;-)

It was intended to be a top level tab.  It should make use of ssl.
Beyond that I do not know.

luke