Re: Potential www redesign at www.deb.at
Hi!
* Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> [2009-10-06 21:37:06 CEST]:
> Rhonda and Kalle have been doing work to make Kalle's proposal
> reality, which you can view at http://www.deb.at. Presumably they'll
> fill us in on more details soon.
There's not much details to fill in, to be honest, the more important
parts were on the list anyway. But let me try to summarize it so people
who don't follow the list too closely can catch it up:
Kalle is working since 2007 on it, he announced it on this very
list[1]. Over the time since he kept working on it and the feedback I
have seen through various channels were all in awe and positive.
Every now and then the topic of a new design did pop up again, that's
nothing new neither, it did pop up regularly before too. Often enough
people only came over with a single image with no posibility to see how
it would work in different browsers or in different sizes, and never did
get back on feedback or questions.
Runa tried get approved for GSoC in that area (and to be precise and
fair to Kalle and Runa it isn't only about the design - just a design
project would get declined by GSoC anyway) and started (or continue,
actually not totally sure who started it) to collect different proposals
in the wiki[2], including Kalle's. This did also run through this list.
Discussions waged about running some design contests, but that is again
nothing new and actually never happened over the years.
In [3] Kalle's proposal was again noted and received positive feedback.
That's more or less where it did come to my attention again. Earlier
this year I remembered it and considered that this part of our project
has been neglected for way to long and thought there has been too much
time wasted already. So I got in contact with Kalle and started to think
about setting up some testing sites to see wether what Kalle has on his
site is actually working code[5] and wether it would work for the bigger
parts.
While I already was working on it, several people addressed me in my
role of the new member of the webmaster team and asked me on wether I
could push something in that direction. I told them that I consider
Kalle's proposal to be "feature-complete" and that I'm working on
getting some test sites set up. This includes also some people that
raised their concerns about that there doesn't happen anything in this
area through the DPL-Team.
The least intrusive part was getting the wiki added because the wiki
engine already supports different themes. So I contacted pabs and asked
him wether he would add the tarballs to the themes folders, and he did.
You can choose debwiki as theme and use [4] as custom URL to see Kalle's
work-in-progress directly. The top bar navigation and the wiki image in
the top left are parts of the tarball and not "just" the css file so he
can't change it that easily, but it's more than enough to get the idea
through.
The next part was setting up <http://packages.deb.at/> with Kalle's
patches (you have to give it a package name to stay there, actually),
which I managed to get finished for debconf and get some feedback for.
This week just I finished setting up <http://www.deb.at/> (right now
deleted all index.XX.html files != en in the top level directory to not
receive more feedback on strange look given that people hand the URL
around without the index.en.html that I explicitly did put into my blog
posting[7]).
You also mentioned to me that you wonder about timeline for the switch:
There isn't any. I'm no dictator. I wanted to have the test sites for
testing purposes, to see for myself how it would work, including of
running the different services, to be able to see how much effort is
behind it and wether it might be reasonable to do so.
Yes, I am thinking of switching. No, I won't make the decision just on
my own. That's why there is no timeline and why I just did this for
myself instead of announcing it beforehand and maybe noticing later that
I've announced something that I'm not able to deliver in a timely
manner. I though *did* communicate my effort with some people that I
know are responsible for other areas touched, like former mentioned wiki
admin, some planet admin about the posibility and chances and also with
yourself with respect to setting up a test site for the BTS.
... wow, that went longish. Maybe there actually _is_ some detail to
fill in. Or maybe I'm just very talkative these days.
[1] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2007/04/msg00481.html>
[2] <http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWebsiteDiscussion#Proposals>
[3] new URL[6] mentioned in
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2008/11/msg00228.html>
[4] <http://kalleswork.net/projects/debian/wiki/debwiki/css/debwiki.css>
[5] And it is. It might be that we transfered some tiny patch parts
through mail only, but the core stuff I added is definitely on
Kalle's site[6]
[6] <http://kalleswork.net/projects/debian/>
[7] <http://rhonda.deb.at/blog/debian/2009/10/06>
Hope that helps. :)
Rhonda
--
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
-- Michael Jackson, "Man In The Mirror"
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