As all of you know, djangosnippets.com is very popular and a pretty integral part of the Django ecosystem. It is a great resource but there are some problems:
1. The site has been online for a few years, and the majority of the snippets were added back in the 1.0 and pre-1.0 era. Many of those snippets no longer work. Some of the snippets have comments containing how to get the snippet working in the current version of Django, but many do not. A lot of snippets have been more or less abandoned by their original poster. 2. The snippets are not very well organized. For instance, one can't bring up a list of snippets that are custom widgets. You can search, but it's not the same. The software is pretty basic and doesn't have many features (relative to Mediawiki). 3. The site hasn't been maintained much over the years. A few months ago I tried to sign up, but a confirmation email never came. I tried a few more times, but still couldn't get an account created. This is my proposal: We get rid of djangosnippets as it is now, and replace it with a Mediawiki. The benefits are as follows: 1. Mediawiki is maintained by a group of people who are able to put way more effort into the software than djangosnippets can. 2. Each snippet is editable. Over time, instead of each snippet being unmaintained, users can add whatever is necessary to make the snippet work again. Mediawiki keeps track of change-sets so vandalism can be reverted. 3. A wiki is more flexible. Each page can be a snippet. Or you can have more than one snippets to one page. Maybe one version of the snippet for Django version 1.0, another version for 1.1, and a third version of the snippets for 1.2 all on the same page. You can also link to other snippets from snippets pages. 4. Better categorization. Mediawiki has a great automatic categorization system. You basically add a tag to a page and it automatically adds it to the category page. We can tag snippets as "Form Field", "Middleware", or "Widget" to denote what kind of snippet is is. We can put all snippets that do not work currently into a "Does not work in 1.2" category to denote all snippets that need to be fixed, etc, etc. And here are the downsides: 1. The current djangosnippets site has a lot of momentum. It's going to be hard to convince people to change it up. We need everyone to be on board to make it happen. I don't want to just create such a site without getting everyone's blessing because community fragmentation is a bad thing. 2. Mediawiki will have to be themed to make it look like the rest of the sites in the Django community (green and white color scheme). Mediawiki is skinnable so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. 3. Django snippets currently references all snippets by a number, such as snippet #1200 or snippet #458. Switching to Mediawiki gets rid of this. There may still be a way to still get pages to be referenced by their primary key, but I'll have to look into it. Is this even an important issue? 4. Mediawiki is not Django. How will this make us look if we used a PHP site to track our snippets? Is this even an issue? I don't think it is, but others may think differently. If there was a native wiki engine for Django we could use that, but such does not exist. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
