Re: New Website for opengroupware.org project

Helge Hess schrieb:

> 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

I'll look at that, see below.

> b) only accounts should be allowed to edit pages

No problem.

> c) it should scale sufficiently well (millions of hits!),
>    maybe this could be solved with Squid or something

MediWiki/Wikipedia uses squid (info on theri hardware and network setup 
can be found here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers)
Twiki is not an option any more with millions of hits.

> d) it should have something like user home pages like on docs

Is possible.
Just as an example: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Kurt_Jansson
It is the personal page of Kurt Jansson (Just choosed him randomly)

>
> Optional:
> e) it would be good if it would allow something like folders for
>    organizing stuff (yes, I know this isn't necessarily Wiki)

What type of data would you like to organize in folders?

> f) a change review process would be great

Do you, that the data isn't put online right away, but is sended in a 
queue where an admin can activate it?
That would be a kind of CMS system and I don't think that any wiki 
realises that, because that concept is the oppisite of the wiki concept.
Maybe the concept of protected pages (see next paragraph) can be a 
workaround for important pages (e.g. support offering companies pages)

> g) protecting certain pages for modifications would be nice

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Administration#Page_protection
Here you can read, that only sysops can edit protected pages

> h) ability to use HTML for content would be nice

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Html_in_wikitext
Here is a list of HTML tags that are permitted.

>
> 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.

That makes sense.

>
>> 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).

Here are some examples of mediawiki skins that are completly different 
from the original layout:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WikinewsSkin-800.png
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:MiniMenu.png
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Simpleskin.png
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Main_Page
As everything can be customized with CSS I don't think we will have any 
problems on rebuilding the ogo layout. Otherwise I could do something 
with the underlying templates.

>
>> As I am using a TWiki (http://www.twiki.org/)
>
As said before forget about TWiki.

> ...
>
>> - 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 machine is doing nothing else, than delivering 1 webpage. Anyhow.

>
> 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.

As said before MediaWiki supports squid.

>
>> - 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.

See above, I think CSS will do the job.

>
>> 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).

Ok. The docs will then also be devided in user docs and dev docs, right?
Do we have to take care of different languages? The english mailinglist 
has (only) double the traffic of the german, sowe might think about 
providing a german site, at least the users section.

>
>> 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.

I thought the colours of the different sections (default, developers, 
sope) should be preserved.

>
>> - No support to create tables in wiki syntax, needs to use HTML.
>
>
> Also OK for me.

My fault, it supports tables.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

>
>> *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.

First we should talk about which parts of the layout are most important 
(3 columns, logo up right, menu on left side is align right, little 
curve in border up left of text, header of page is underlined, 
underlining flows into the border on the right side, ...).
Maybe you can just print the page out, mark the important pages and fax 
them to me or do it in a image.

I just discovered, that the sidebar on right side changes quite often. 
It's different in Home, About, Projects, InstantOGo, Related, ... That 
gives me a headache. Do we need different sidebars? It probably won't 
make problems to have different sidebars in user and dev section.


Regards,
Mario Minati
-- 
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