description of different OSGeo website types

[Jo Walsh]

dear all, it is great to hear this discussion going on.

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 12:25:19PM -0500, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Jason Birch wrote:
> >There will be a requirement for the CMS to tie into the OpenLDAP server 
> >that we will be putting in place in the new hardware.  We need to keep 
> >our system manageable.

I would like to call for diagrams of the systems that are going to be
in place both on Jan 1 and then embellished in the future. :)

I would also like to re-draw the attention of list members to this
presentation of website design considerations written up by Jody: 
https://webcommittee.osgeo.org/servlets/GetAttachment?list=dev&msgId=24001&attachId=1

I think this represents several different "views" on a model of OSGeo.
There is a main external-interface site, for consumption by potential
users, potential sponsors, press and the like, that also holds clear legal
information, and the foundation part of the eclipse.org site is a good
example to be following. There should be a heavy emphasis on
walkthrough demo, user story material. So there is a
"multi-page-narrative" object that would be very useful here.

There are also per-project views. These are using the same LDAP
datastore, i suppose, to manage user authentication and
responsibilities. A project site has requirements like PDF export of
documentation, and a simple documentation collaboration environment
(the 'book' module, maybe?) trac/svn integration - even if this is
done through the simple expedient of RSS feeds - is a very
nice-to-have here. Package distribution and download management - this
whole platform needs a way for projects to easily get activity
reports.

Next to this there are committee/'Party' specific sites - for the
geodata committee, the education committee, the conference committee,
etc. All are going to have slightly different needs. Calendaring is
important as well as being able to collect the calendars into one
place.

What there is now as the 'community site' is, well, it was never
intended to have a firm direction but instead to be a site for
experimentation, switching things on and off and seeing what works.
I would not necessarily take this as a model for the ultimate output
of the OSGeo web presence (though a community aggregator site is
important, sites like planetgs do a goodish partial job, and i think
the priorities right now are more to get a prototype project-specific
site, and a prototype foundation-general site (featuring prominently
the membership application which KK, Swapnil et al are intended to be
working on).

I don't know how much of this could be considered in the remit of
people working on this effort right now. Nor what the best way of
implementing these different kinds of 'profiles' for viewing OSGeo
activity is, in drupal - would Views work here or is this looking more
like a set of slightly different Themes? 

cheers,


jo
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