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To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
From: Jorg Heymans <jheymans@apache.org>
Subject: Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:36:13 +0200
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Arje Cahn wrote:

> I just have to share my frustrations.

Thanks for this!


> The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I 
> feel there are much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened 
> out before the shinyness of our website is of any importance. We need
>  to decide where we put what, as it's currently spread all over the 
> place: Cocoon website, mailinglists, the Wiki, blogs, zones.apache, 
> Daisy documentation, etc etc...

It's certainly true that there is a lot of old doc 'crap' still floating
around, but i think it's pretty clear that daisy has the most up to date 
content, is by far the easiest to get something written on and 
consequently quite frequently updated (can we have a show of hands on 
how many people know how to update the cocoon website ? __without__ 
looking at the howto ? ) But as you say, it's too hidden.

So:

Steven Noels wrote:

> stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for
> official ASF documentation sites? Why can't cocoon.apache.org simply
> be a proxy for http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/documentation/ ?

Yes, why not?

If it's not allowed we should replace the homepage of all those sites 
with a simple redirect. To be somehow ASF compliant we do a daily 
daisy-blob dump, bzip it and commit to SVN. Simple. And if that's not 
compliant enough we create a trigger of some sort that does this 
everytime someone adds/modifies content.

> So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon 
> website :-)
> 
> - Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 
> entries on the page, spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally 
> sucks! For a newcomer, this is not a good sign. It would really help,
>  if we got someone to add 1 news entry every month, with 3 lines 
> minimum. We've recently added a bunch of committers to the project, 
> which is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's put it on there!

again, the threshold for doing this is too high
1) svn co'ing the xdocs or whatever format the website is in,
2) figuring out how to add an item and make it look good without messing 
up everything else. Let's not even think about a possible content 
restructure.
3) figuring out how to publish the site (forrest? forrestbot?) locally 
first to see what it looks like
4) i don't even remember what to do next

> - NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the 
> homepage. I mean, look at *any* commercial website and see how many 
> clicks you need to get to the news and marketing yadayada.

see my previous point.

> - Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once 
> have a Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think 
> part of this dream was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it 
> will be forgotten forever. How embarissing it is to see Helma working
>  at the GT practically alone on all our docs. This has everything to 
> do with the total invisibility of the documentation website. Let's 

So let's make it more visible. See my previous comment about pointing 
all current resources to daisy.

> - And finally, I feel so sorry for www.planetcocoon.com and 
> www.spreadcocoon.com. Same probably goes for zones.apache, 
> cocoondev.org, and all the other nice initiatives people have 

both planetcocoon and spreadcocoon have reached the stage of near 
absolute stasis. I mean, thanks Mark Leicester for the great effort back 
then, but it just didn't float and at this point they only contribute to 
the perception that cocoon is dead. I'm all for consistency, so if Mark 
would be so kind and we all agree: let's replace their homepages with a 
redirect to daisy.

>  1 location where people actually start to look when they are 
> searching for Cocoon: cocoon.apache.org. And we need regular changes 
> on there.

we can argue about the domain name, but the content should be driven and 
managed from daisy.


Just my 0.02EUR,
Jorg