Hey, I'm a programmer myself ;) as a reassurance:
the changes this discussion talks about will happen in jakarta-site2, and will consist of backwards-compatible changes to site.xsl and site.vsl. Projects that depend on jakarta-site2 will change to the new look and feel automatically. For projects that don't, all I ask is that they, after evalutation of the changes, update their local copies of those files. And it really is just a request. So this will _not_ change the way a project website is maintained. Somewhat further down the road is converting your project to use maven. This is apparantly not that difficult. The advantage maven will bring you is that you have to worry _less_ about updating the website, as it does a lot of boring stuff for you. This is of course a project's own decision! as background: Our company is venturing out from its microsoft-only platform and directly into open source, because a big new client requires it. Some of my collegues want to move from ASP to PHP. I wan't to move to all the wonderful stuff at jakarta. Problem is, my boss makes the decision. To convince him, step 1 is a project site which he likes. Danny: > I agree with Ted, it'd be nice to have a more polished and brand conscious > site, but at then end of the day we're just a bunch of geeks writing stuff > for other geeks, and in general I think we each want to concentrate our > efforts on the geek stuff. except that the website is not only for geeks. It's also for people that make decisions and have money. > Leo Simons wrote: > > anyone feel like throwing stones at me yet? :) > Ted: > Only to remind you that the programmers/developers are the > decision-makers here. So if you want them to buy into something, you > need to coddle them the same way you would your boss or any other suit. And I always thought being reasonable, giving good arguments and doing the job yourself if you want it done was how we work =) > The day Jakarta starts to say, it has to be this-way or > else, is the day a lot of us would choose or-else. I think many people will agree that how the website looks and works is something where it would be very benificial to all the projects if there was a consensus. So I think Jakarta _should_ say: "*here's* why we recommend we all do it *this way*, and *here's* how to do that" (ie see: http://jakarta.apache.org/site/jakarta-site2.html) > When the "original designers" are not available, whoever is available > needs to do whatever needs to be done. The only ones we are sure are > going to be here are the programmers, so the programmers ~have~ to be > able to do everything. I very much agree. I was under the impression though that at this point, there are some designers available somewhere. It would be good if they would explain which things would be good to change so we can put that into the system. > I'm very much in favor of what you are trying to do, but what we want to > hear is that this is something that should just work out of the box for > everyone, but can still be easily adjusted if necessary. =) One thing the proposed changes will do is that they will make it easier to adjust the stylesheet. In short, I understand these concerns, they are of course addressed, and we can go a little further than that once maven stabilises and make everything even better (how's that for marketing? :P) cheers, - Leo -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
