Re: New Website for opengroupware.org project

Hi Mario,

On 26. Jun 2005, at 13:02 Uhr, Mario Minati wrote:
> The inspiration of this effort came during a meeting between Helge  
> and me on the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe (Germany) on Saturday.

Just to restate some of the requirements I mentioned:
a) it should be possible to preserve the current page layout, not
    necessarily 1:1, but it should be close
b) only accounts should be allowed to edit pages
c) it should scale sufficiently well (millions of hits!),
    maybe this could be solved with Squid or something
d) it should have something like user home pages like on docs

Optional:
e) it would be good if it would allow something like folders for
    organizing stuff (yes, I know this isn't necessarily Wiki)
f) a change review process would be great
g) protecting certain pages for modifications would be nice
h) ability to use HTML for content would be nice

Our hardware: currently the sponsored hardware driving the website is  
a Dual 800 MHz PIII with 1 GB RAM.  It also hosts Bugzilla and  
Subversion.

> First I would like to name some of the problems with the current  
> website:
> 1. Difficult to maintain. Helge told me that it takes up to one  
> hour until modifications are online, due to the design of the  
> current system (pages are hosted in a svn).

Si.

> 2. Maintainence through community is difficult, because of 1

Big issue.

> 3. Documentation Plone doesn't seem to work properly, due to  
> database problems (indexes need to be rebuilded sometimes)

I don't know the exact issues. I think Chris wanted to upgrade the  
Plone but we didn't found the time to properly set things up for him.

Anyway: first I would focus on fixing the main site. Migrating Plone  
should be a second step.

> Helge and Jens Münster (Skyrix) liked the idea and you hopefully too.

Yes *if* it is possible to preserve the visual identity of the  
project. Eg

   http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page

and also most Plone sites are bad examples for that (ours included).

> As I am using a TWiki (http://www.twiki.org/)
...
> - On my machine (P2, 233Mhz, 96MB RAM) it takes around 10 secs to  
> calculate a page.

Thats slow. But the machine is _really_ old, we have 10times the RAM  
and 8times the cycles ;-)

The most important thing to know is this one:
> - I am not sure if a squid proxy could bring the load down, because  
> each page is generated dependig on the users preferences. Ok squid  
> would help for the people which are not logged in and are browsing  
> as guest users.

Guest users should be the far majority of the trafic.

> - In c't 2003/25 page 202 (german computer magazine) is a test of a  
> few wiki engines and they also named scalability and search speed  
> as one of the drawbacks of Twiki.

Ok. RCS doesn't sound like a proper backend ;-)

> - It has many plugins, just to name some usefully for ogo homepage:

I don't think any of those are really required.

> The alternative I thought of is the Mediawiki (http:// 
> meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_list) because it is the  
> wiki system from the Wikipedia project.
> - For sure it is skinable (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ 
> Gallery_of_user_styles , Howto: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ 
> User_styles),

Hm, that doesn't look too encouraging (pretty similiar "common style"  
like in Plone). Customization as described on those links seems to be  
based on just JavaScript and CSS which is most likely insufficient.

I suppose to get what we want for the site design, we would need to  
patch the templates of the Wiki being used.

> but I am not certain if we could handle different styles for the  
> different sections of the opengroupware homepage.

Thats only temporary. IMHO devs.opengroupware.org and  
www.opengroupware.org can and should be separate servers (/ Wiki  
installations).

> Disadvantages are:
> - It has only an mysql backend, which brings up a backup problem.

Should be OK.

> - Different skins are probably not possible, as mentioned before.

No problem.

> - No support to create tables in wiki syntax, needs to use HTML.

Also OK for me.

> *And finally I would like to invite everyone to bring in his/her  
> experiences with (dfifferent) wiki systems, that we can come to a  
> well made decison.*

Maybe you could check whether you manage to skin MediaWiki to look  
closely like the current website. If that turns out to be possible,  
its probably the way to go.

Greets,
   Helge
-- 
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/
OpenGroupware.org

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