New MapServer Website (beta)

[Howard Butler]

All,

I am pleased to announce the beta release of the new MapServer
website.  The site is located at <http://ms.gis.umn.edu>.

I, Kari Guerts, the mapserver-docs team, and the developers have been
working to develop a site that streamlines documentation development,
allows through-the-web editing (but not a free-for-all like a wiki),
provides searching capabilites, provides support for multi-lingual
documents, and provides for structured content types.  The new website was
developed using Plone <http://plone.org>, with some additional libraries
that add functionality and some minor coding to make things fit the project
better.

Some examples of documents on the site include the Mapfile reference
<http://ms.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/mapfile/>, the howto list
<http://ms.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto>, and a "Getting started with MapServer"
document (only exists on the new site thanks to David Fawcett)
<http://ms.gis.umn.edu/new_users/>.

As a user with this site, you can now participate in the documentation of
MapServer.  By "joining" the site, you can create content, submit howtos,
faqs, and tutorials for inclusion in the site, add comments to existing
documents, and help translate documents into your native language.  I will
be working on documents to describe how you can participate in the coming
weeks.  Once you join the site, make sure to go to your "Personal
Preferences" page and update your email alert preference, your picture if
you want, and your latitude/longitude (Sean posted some details of how this
can be used here <http://zcologia.com/news/33>).

The website should be considered beta-level, much like the beta releases of
the software.  If you find an issue, please let me know and/or file a bug
in bugzilla in the website category, and I'll try to get to it.  The two
sites will continue to run in parallel for a while, very likely until after
the release of 4.6 and MUM3, to allow it to grow out of its initial bugs,
to allow for ample time for people to get comfortable with it, and to not
add another item to the conference crunch.

Much of the existing documentation on the blue site has been migrated to
the new site, although things might not be perfectly in sync yet.  We're
working to migrate things over as time permits.  There are also a few other
website bugs here and there, the logo is just a place holder, and I'm sure
there are many other issues I don't even know about yet ;).  The general
structure is there, however, with much of the content filled out so you can
get a feel for how things will look in the future.  After the beta period,
the site will probably be moved to <http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu> (and
continue to exist at its current address), and the stuff in the blue site
will be preserved and made available on something like
<http://old.mapserver.gis.umn.edu>.

I would like to thank Kari, Steve, Tom Burk and the UMN team, the
mapserver-docs crew, and the developers for all of their help and input on
this project.

Howard

PS.  Remember that there is a server outage tonight, so it might not be
available due to the outage.