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Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 22:36:59 +0100
From: Ross Gardler <rgardler@apache.org>
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Subject: Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
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Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
> we have plenty of activity in our community, so a couple of news 
> items per month would be a much better reflection of our reality. So how 
> do we achieve this?

Some options (which don't require new tools):

Daisy can be used to create "blog like" pages that can be automatically 
brought together into a news page. I agree that it should be the home 
page, but Daisy would not limit the info to just this page. Perhaps 3 
items on the home page, and a larger news only page. Note that Daisy can 
also be made to create RSS feeds, but that's a "next step".

Alternatively, have the site generation pull content from peoples 
existing blogs. Forrest has a plugin for this (although it is pretty 
basic), I'm sure Maven can be made to do it. The problem with this 
approach is that there is no control over the content that is published.

Of course there are lots of other ways, but they involve new tools so 
I'm steering away form those.

> First I think we need some common idea about what is a news item. Some 
> suggestions would be:

All your suggestions look just fine, I'm sure having an exhaustive list 
is impossible, but your list is a great starting point. I'm more 
concerned about *who* will write these items and who will publish the 
site frequently. It really is a case of providing a login and password 
to a publishing tool after it is configured.

Which publishing tool to use? I don't care. Forrest does it well (but it 
does need a new skin, there is a partially complete skin that Helma and 
I put together some time ago, but I have not had the time to finish it 
off yet.

> Second we need some (simple) way to suggest news. I think we should 
> suggest possible news items at the dev-list by having a special headers 
> prefix like [news].

I'd suggest just letting (self-registered) people add a news item to 
Daisy. Committers items will be published automatically, others will 
require publication by a committer - in daisy this is just a click of a 
link once logged in.

Posting to the list is just a step too many in my view. Why not put it 
straight in Daisy where it can be edited and published quickly and 
easily. Don't forget Daisy edits are already sent to the docs list.

> Third, as the website is our official voice, we need some kind of 
> community oversight. I think lazy consensus should be enough. If no one 
> have protested in maybe three days, we should add the news item to the 
> news page. Of course if someone with marketing skills would like 
> volunteer and take a larger responsibility for creating and editing the 
> news contents that would great.

Sure, this all works fine with direct entry into Daisy rather then on 
the list (where everyone and their dog will chip in but only one or two 
will actually do anything). Daisy can be configured to only publish 
items that were written x days ago, thus automatically allowing for lazy 
consensus.

---

I support the above as a "small step", I think it may encourage more 
people into using Daisy a little.

Ross