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RE: New Debian Site



I was going through Debian's lists and came across this conversation which 
left me a bit perplexed:

_______________________________________________________________

> > Hello, I was wondering why you don't ever change your site template?

> Cause it's not so easy and most developers have better things to do.

How can you say that while there are lots of people out there willing to help,
who even wrote on the mailing list?

> > Do you need any help, I am really good with such things. For free of
> > course =) I can even install the cms system such as drupal and
> > customize themes for it.

> Seems you're not aware of the way how our pages are being built now.

> Pages are being kept in the CVS repository and are made in WML. HTML
> pages are being built from WML files. Right now only English part of our
> website consist of 8792 files, while whole repository has more than 50k
> pages.

> Whole infrastructure supports easy internationalisation. Pages are
> accessible and readable even from text-based browsers.

> Can you achieve it with some CMS?

I would say yes: Plone, which uses Zope as a CMF, has an amazing
workflow and can be easily configured, but also a new CMS could be built
on top of Zope to work efficiently.

> > If you need any help let me know. Caz a lot
> > of people saying it is really ugly, also a lot of people say that if
> > you would change your site and community forum etc. for example like
> > Ubuntu has, they would switch to Debian in a hart beat.

> Debian is about FreeSoftware and not about fancy pages and forums.
> There are plenty unofficial forums.

> We're trying to build the best free operating system and not the best
> webpage.

As I said in one of my previous email:

"Now I personally think that most of the times a site reflects the
quality of the product it's selling, and I think that the Debian's
site does not reflect it as well as it could."

> regards
> fEnIo
______________________________________________________________


I would also like to add:
1) images can be easily added so that they load only after the text has been loaded
so that the user does not have to wait a long time, plus, mainly users who are interested
in linux and opensource, etc are obviously people interested in technology, and I would
not understand why they would still have a 56K.
2) implementing an elaborated theme does not mean that the site is not accessible any more
through text based web browsers: that is why web developers love so much css. Try looking at
http://www.csszengarden.com/ with and without the css and you will see that they are perfectly
accessible.

Now, I see that Debian is full of people that are willing to help, why not accept this help,
and try organizing a team to develop a new site?

By all means, if you see my email as being rude or aggressive, that is absolutely not my goal: all I'm
trying to do is understand why there is so much skepticism in building a new web site.

regards,
Augusto Frausin


--
Augusto Frausin
webmaster & server admin @ itm5.net

Via Panizza 11
20144, Milan
Italy

tel: 02 43911692
cell: 3493925166
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