Re: Website Update

[padams1]

		  Hi Mark and all,

Just some quick responses to the issues Mark raises.

> I do not think it is a good idea to roll out anything new until after the Southampton Event, because this will cause a lot of confusion. Also there is and will be no requirement to register for the Southampton

OK, good point. I won't make any changes until the next meeting which requires registration.

> people are now familiar with it and associate it with the OSSG brand

I don't think we've ever made any decisions on group branding, but point taken.

> In other words it is working and working well so I don't think you should throw away a lot of your earlier work.

It is working, but it isn't working well. When I first implemented the site it was designed to support the work of those developing the proposal for the group's formation. It's still very good at the collaboration stuff, but that's about it. It really isn't all that suitable for the day-today stuff (public information). A lot of people like the site because of the Zope/Plone usage, which is why I liked it. But these are hungry tools, which require a lot of tlc. From a professional standpoint, I  feel I would be doing the group a complete injustice by leaving behind a system that requires highly specialised knowledge to run. After all, I'm not going to be webmaster forever. As it stands, the current system is hard to maintain and is hard for people to find their way around and even I'm not 100% sure how parts of it work.

> However from a Change and Project Management viewpoint I think it is safer to have as little change as possible

It's very easy to do this "safely". If the FSF can upgrade their site from plain HTML to Zope/Plone overnight then we can do the opposite. Once the site is finalised, all that is required is a change in my Apache config and the url will point at the new site.

> my suggestion would be to use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP

 Well ahead of you on this one

> returning just basic HTML

HTML is a language for describing the semantics of a web page, but people throw in display code anyway. In order to be standards compliant (esp. web accessibility) the semantics of a web page must be separated from the display code, so CSS is a must. Unfortunately different browsers interpret CSS in different ways. But that's my problem to deal with. XHTML is preferable over plain HTML for many many reasons. 

> It is absolutely vital to transfer all the current material to any upgraded site.

Yes and no. The current site will remain (with a different url) as the organisational hub of the OSSG. The new site (which will get the ossg.bcs.org url) will be our main public site. The "advert" if you will, giving details of events etc. Oxford branch and other SGs use two sites in this manner and keeping the two separate does keep it all "clean".

> With regard to the Committee Bio pages I think it would be better if we could write and maintain our own without having to submit it to anyone else.

If I'm to maintain the website, it has to end up with me somehow. I'm only looking for a paragraph, not your life story.