Brett Parker wrote:
Jim Rippon jim@rippon.org.uk wrote:
David Reynolds wrote:
I'm not sure how long the current site has been about, being a *fairly* new Alugger, but as Brett said in a previous email, the design is beginning to look a bit dated. Surely this thread is an ideal time to raise the subject of perhaps redesigning the site and trying to find a new way forward for the future web presence of Alug.
Another thing that should be discussed is who is going to take responsibility for the site. As far as I can tell many people would be interested in having a hand in the website, keeping it up to date, adding content, etc but no one has even been offered the chance. Surely by using some kind of CMS it will allow more people to contribute and keep the site up to date without having to rely on one person to patch the site.
I agree with david that some sort of updated CMS would certainly make it much more attractive for me, personally, to update and provide content for the website, although its likely that this is due to the fact that I am currently putting a zope/plone CMS in at work and have been working quite closely on that for the past 3 months.
I've played with that combo recently too, it's not bad, bit on the slow side unless fed by a powerful machine. www.stu.uea.ac.uk used to run a Zope instance back when me and MJ Ray where working for them, Zope's come a long way since then, and plone is a nice bolt on the top of it... Not sure that it's going to be a good bolt for the alug site though, might be worth throwing bits of the alug site at it and seeing what happens...
I was involved with the current stu.uea.ac.uk website selection as that was part of the death of the TSW. Much embarasment there was there - but the point of zope and plone is that it can be used and indeed administered by a non-techincal leader, in this case the comms officer.
I dont think anyone is suggesting we need to descend to the abyss of completly stupid-user style plone systems, but plone is a very nice multiple user system to run where areas of control can be allocated to prevent website poisonings from occuring. Its less powerful then most wikis, but incredibly easy to use...
But in this group of luggers, you are never going to get everyone satisified at the same time - you would first need to reach an agreement on how to decide to move forwards.
The other thing about this group is that most of them are despotic - it comes from a long history of experience, where being despotic a) usualy gets results and b) means you dont have any problems (for the majority of times) - how many network admins here can claim to be non-despotic about how the run their networks? how many sysadmins are non-despotic? Is this such a bad trait to have?
JT