[Open-bio-l] volunteering for openbio

[chris dagdigian]

Hi folks,

<lots of nice comments re websites snipped...>

Anyone seriously interested in helping out with the next generation 
website(s) should join the "webteam@open-bio.org" mailing list. Email me 
if you can't find the URL for the web signup form.

Since the original webteam volunteers have faded away I've spent some 
time on my own researching the various content management systems 
(CMF's). Our needs are pretty simple: we don't want a cheezy portal or 
web blog full of fancy features. This is because our single biggest 
problem is that we lack the volunteers to actually create content for 
the website. I'm usually months behind updating bioperl.org and it looks 
really really bad.  Ideally our websites should be very basic and 
include little more than news + documentation and possibly some FAQ or 
wikki sections...

This is my list of requirements for our next gen websites:

(1) People must be able to submit news entries via the web. These news 
items need to be able to be sorted into categories and then syndicated 
via RSS or some other mechanism so that for instance biojava.org can 
show "Open Bio News" if they like

(2) Web content must be easily edited. Support for WebDAV would be 
awesome as it would allow people to checkout/publish straight html by 
using any sort of editor ranging from Dreamweaver to emacs.

(3) Website must support easily both dynamic content (news) and lots of 
static content (documentation, email list archives, etc. etc.) that 
rarely changes

(4) All URLS within the site need to be sensible and bookmarkable. If we 
cannot be indexed by search engines like google then we are screwed. 
Some CMF systems (especially those that use PHP) do a really bad job 
with internal URLs for their dynamic content.

(5) There should be a uniform look and feel across _all_ the open bio 
website for basic stuff. The individual sites should be able to diverge 
as much as they like from this. Hell, I'd be happy if at least all of 
our sites had a comment header and footer bar.

That is about it.

During the course of my evaluation work my personal opinion became that 
the best possible CMF framework from us was the combination of the three 
following systems:

(1) Zope application server (www.zope.org) front-ended by Apache. This 
system includes built in RDBMS/HTTP/FTP/WebDAV is written in python and 
is really slick

(2) CMF zope content management framework (http://cmf.zope.org) to 
provide the basic foundation for web app development

(3) Plone portal framework (http://www.plone.org). Plone sits on top of 
Zope CMF and provides a ready to go portal site

I've already built a secret demo site using Apache + Zope + CMF + Plone 
and was able to get halfway through my "proof of concept" tests before 
my lack of python and DHTML scripting skills slowed my progress to a 
standstill. Being able to check out pages from the site; edit them in 
Dreamweaver and publish the new HTML to the site via WebDAV was really 
nice. If anyone here knows python/zope/DHTML and wants to get involved 
I'd apprediate it. There is a bit of a learning curve but zope really 
seems to be a great system to get behind.

Also- if we do gain some PHP hackers I'd be willing to build the site on 
top of postnuke or some similar system as long as we had a suitable 
committment from people so we don't get left hanging with a system that 
the core volunteers. Our needs are so simple that postnuke plus some PHP 
hacking should sort us out quite nicely.

Website discussions are probably off-topic for this list. I'd encourage 
people who are interested in helping us get rid of our current horriffic 
websites to join the webteam mailing list.

I've promised on pain of having to buy beer in Edmonton for all the OBF 
folks that I'd have 2 things done before BOSC'02 :)

(1) Bring our new production Netra server and RAID chassis online
(3) Have at least one next-generation website online

Please help me get this stuff done! I can't afford to match those crazy 
brits drink for drink

Regards,
Chris


-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag@sonsorol.org>
Independent life science IT & informatics consulting
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
PGP KeyID: 83D4310E Yahoo IM: craffi Web: http://bioteam.net