[OSGeo-Board] RE: [Web Comm] Focus

[Gary Lang]

To be clear:

My point was on common pages for the projectname.osgeo.org page,
certainly not for projects. We're not providing enough value added to
make more work for hobu for example, nor do I think we have a graphic
design as appealing as MapServer's yet.

But whatever we do have for now should establish a "brand" of some kind.

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Jason Birch [mailto:Jason.Birch at nanaimo.ca] 
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 8:38 PM
To: dev at webcommittee.osgeo.org
Cc: dev at visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org; OSGeo-Board
Subject: [OSGeo-Board] RE: [Web Comm] Focus

Arnulf, I warned you...   :)  
 
In my best-case scenario, we would have two options:
 
- delegating the projectname.osgeo.org subdomains to the projects to use
on their own servers, with a recommendation for some kind of consistent
styling and branding.  So, your current mapbender.org server would be
accessible as mapbender.osgeo.org.  I don't really envy you the task of
skinning mediawiki though.
 
- having projects build their entire presense on projectname.osgeo.org,
where the main styling is pretty much impossible to escape from
 
The more I think about this, the less tenable it seems though.
Delegating the subdomain to another server would mean that accessing the
osgeo.org resources (svn, mailing lists, etc) would be difficult, and
existing projects will likely not want to move to a structure that
doesn't supply anything like a CMS or wiki.  
 
As much as the project "splash" pages at projectname.osgeo.org seem a
bit kludgy, they may actually be the most flexible approach.  Using
these as the info pages might also work, but I would have concerns about
enforcing a nonpartisan marketing message across these pages, especially
for projects that have their entire presense hosted there, such as
MapGuide.
 
I do see Gary's point about consistent styling across projects.  Even if
we can't host them all on the osgeo.org domain (it would actually be
pretty easy if we had full control over the infrastructure) some kind of
move towards a consistent styling would be a good idea.  
 
I'd like to see a revision of the styling of the main osgeo.org site
before that though.  It needs more colour, and tie-in with the compass
theme.  I unfortunately have neither the access nor the talent to
redesign the site.
 
Jason
 
 
________________________________

From: Arnulf Christl [@ccgis.de]
Sent: Fri 2006-06-30 6:58 AM
Subject: Re: [Web Comm] Focus



Jason Birch wrote:
> This is what I had in mind for the project info pages:
> 
> https://www.osgeo.org/content/projects/mapbender.html 
> <https://www.osgeo.org/content/projects/mapbender.html>
> 
> Feedback?  (other than bawling me out for using <font> tags... )

This is great.

@Gary: You see - this is what a project can get out of OSGeo. It (the
project) does not have to hack their own HTML with static <font> tags
but a professional team takes care of it. (Jason, i say this only
because I am such a very funny person...)

> I'd really like to see something done about the domains and look/feel.
Can we either:
> 
>  - Not require that projects have a presence under the osgeo.org 
> domain structure or
> 
>  - Figure out how to delegate these subdomains to the individual
projects so they can continue with their current infrastructure?

Are you suggesting to drop the mapbender.osgeo.org and only keep
www.mapbender.org ("mapbender" always just as an example) and this new
info page?

Regards, Arnulf.



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