Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 10/19/06, Ross Gardler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...But is there any need for the news item to be sent to the live server immediately? I don't think so. A daily update will do just fine. For now use the Forrest generated tar, or a maven generated tar if someone sets it up... You're right, we don't have a need for immediate publishing, a few hours delay could be good enough. Let's see what happens with continuum, but in the meantime we could work as you suggest (assuming someone does write stuff, of course ;-) -Bertrand
Forrest zone auto startup (was: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here)
On 10/20/06, David Crossley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...Forrest doesn't have automatic httpd restart and the zones machine goes down a lot... Note that, altough Solaris apparently has something new and improved, the old rc*.d stuff does work. On the cocoon zone we have created the usual apache2 start script links: /etc/rc0.d/K16apache2 /etc/rc1.d/K16apache2 /etc/rc2.d/K16apache2 /etc/rc3.d/S50apache2 /etc/rcS.d/K16apache2 And they work fine. Also, if you need to startup non-root stuff automatically, I have created a script for that on our zone, see http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COCOON-1923. This is also started in /etc/rc3.d and calls $HOME/rc/start and $HOME/rc/stop for each user where these files exist. We use it to start Daisy, the Cocoon demos and Continuum on our zone, all running under their respective usernames. -Bertrand
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Niclas Hedhman wrote: Steven Noels wrote: What those Belgian guys ? however (in)frequently murmured amongst themselves was: why the ? stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for ? official ASF documentation sites? Why can't cocoon.apache.org simply ? be a proxy for http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/documentation/ ? I think it is related to the principles of primary resources; - mailing lists - subversion - ? which infrastructure works hard to make sure are operational, backed-up, fail-over, disaster planning et al. Wiki and other stuff is not considered primary, and doesn't enjoy the attention of the infrastructure folks. Yep. Also the cocoon.zones.apache.org is only an experimental playground. It is risky to rely on it. There is a lot of mis-information about the use of SVN and websites. The docs source content is an asset and needs to be stored. The generated docs currently need to be in SVN so that websites can be easily restored by the infrastructure people. The infrastructure site-dev mailing list tried to find other solutions to enable any content repository, generate final docs to staging area, rsync to production. That has stalled. If someone has the energy, it would be great to help move that again. Any committer can subscribe. http://www.apache.org/dev/infra-mail.html ---oOo--- Anyway, here is a proposed solution for Cocoon ... - A) Store docs content in Daisy. The /2.1/ content is already there and /2.2/ is being developed. Move the content for the top-level website from xdocs into Daisy (see http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/CocoonWebsiteUpdate). Move select docs from the current wiki.a.o/cocoon into Daisy. Remove current wiki and use Daisy instead. - B) Generate final docs into a staging area on cocoon.zones.a.o Don't care how this happens. Some straight Daisy docs, some from Maven, some generated by Forrest (would need to rsync from forrest.zones.apache.org). Using CSS we should be able to make it consistent. - C) Give each committer a local publish shell script. This updates their working copy of the cocoon/site/ SVN, then rsyncs generated docs from cocoon.zones.a.o/stage/ and does 'svn commit'. - D) A cronjob on people.apache.org does 'svn update' to put the site into production. Already happening. - E) Improve the backup of docs source. http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COCOON-1925 - F) Work with infrastructure site-dev@ find better solutions. -
Writing and managing news releases (was Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here)
Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: On 10/19/06, Ross Gardler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...But is there any need for the news item to be sent to the live server immediately? I don't think so. A daily update will do just fine. For now use the Forrest generated tar, or a maven generated tar if someone sets it up... You're right, we don't have a need for immediate publishing, a few hours delay could be good enough. Let's see what happens with continuum, but in the meantime we could work as you suggest (assuming someone does write stuff, of course ;-) For those interested Reinhard and I have made a small start on the configuration of Daisy to manage news items in the 2.2 docs. The output needs to be prettied up - but it does work. Basically, create a new document of type NewsItem and publish it (or get an editor to publish it for you). The seven most recent will appear on the welcome page [1] I've added a tagging system that allows filtered news items to appear on welcome pages for sub-sites for each block. The tags field is free form, you can enter anything you want. We can use this field to filter news items. At present there is only one tag that does anything. If you add core to the tags your news item will appear on the core sub-site [2] [I'm not too familiar with the intended use of the cdocs layout can someone check I put this in the right place.] Sorry I've not added news filters for all of the blocks or added the lazy consensus date filter to the queries - no time today - maybe someone can do this. Ross [1] http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/cdocs/g2/g1/g1/1213.htm [2] http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/cdocs-core/1270.html
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Ross Gardler said the following on 18/10/06 23:36: Daniel Fagerstrom wrote: [news items] Guys, I wholeheartily welcome your ideas of news items and I fully agree with Ross that they should be entered in Daisy directly. If Daisy can be configured to auto-publish after a delay, that's great. Daisy can be used to create blog like pages that can be automatically brought together into a news page. I agree that it should be the home page, but Daisy would not limit the info to just this page. Perhaps 3 items on the home page, and a larger news only page. Note that Daisy can also be made to create RSS feeds, but that's a next step. I was thinking right along these lines, so I fully agree. Alternatively, have the site generation pull content from peoples existing blogs. Forrest has a plugin for this (although it is pretty basic), I'm sure Maven can be made to do it. The problem with this approach is that there is no control over the content that is published. I agree, I'd rather have a list of blogs of Cocoon committers/users than pull content directly from their blog. This, however, is of secondary importance. Let's focus on improving/extending the actual documentation content first. Of course there are lots of other ways, but they involve new tools so I'm steering away form those. Thanks for not going into tools discussions. First I think we need some common idea about what is a news item. Some suggestions would be: All your suggestions look just fine, I'm sure having an exhaustive list is impossible, but your list is a great starting point. I'm more +1 concerned about *who* will write these items and who will publish the site frequently. It really is a case of providing a login and password to a publishing tool after it is configured. As said earlier: I volunteer to run the process to publish the site as long as I don't have to do more than start a script, provide a login and password and get clear error messages (preferably none at all) that tell me where to look for the trouble. Posting to the list is just a step too many in my view. Why not put it straight in Daisy where it can be edited and published quickly and easily. Don't forget Daisy edits are already sent to the docs list. True, as is pointed out earlier posting news to the dev list takes more work because it needs to be copy and pasted into Daisy, while you can enter it in Daisy straight away and be done with it. I support the above as a small step, I think it may encourage more people into using Daisy a little. Great points. Thanks. Bye, Helma
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 10/18/06, Ross Gardler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...Which publishing tool to use? I don't care. Forrest does it well (but it does need a new skin,... Is there a way to republish only a few pages quickly from Daisy to the online site? Or how hard is that to implement? Without going into a tools discussion, having a quick way to update just the homepage and the news (and maybe an aggregated blog feed) would help us be more active on those pages I guess. If I can add a news item in five minutes I'll do it regularly, if it takes 15 minutes it'll be much less often. Might simply be a case of the Forrestbot generating a subset tar.gz instead of the one pointed to by http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/CocoonWebsiteUpdate (http://forrest.zones.apache.org/ seems to be down right now, cannot check it size but I assume it's quite big). -Bertrand
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 10/19/06, hepabolu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...Let's focus on improving/extending the actual documentation content first. Just to clarify my understanding of the current discussion: IIUC, Arje's point is to make the homepage and one or two news pages much more lively, and concentrate our communication to http://cocoon.apache.org The other docs also need to be improved as well, of course, but that's more of a medium-term goal I guess, given the current limited manpower available to do that. -Bertrand
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 10/19/06, hepabolu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... I'm not into the full details of the update process of the site, but if we're only updating a few pages (home and news), is it possible to just extract those and put them directly onto cocoon.apache.org without going through the svn process?... Not at this time, it has to go via svn. But if it's just downloading a small tar.gz from the forrestbot, unarchiving, checking and committing 2-3 files it'd be quick enough I guess. -Bertrand
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
I wrote a reply to Bertrands post then read the thread and discovered Reinhard is going to set up continuum. Seems like we have a volunteer and since I'm only giving ideas not implementation time you'd all be best to ignore the rest of this post ;-) Ross Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: On 10/18/06, Ross Gardler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...Which publishing tool to use? I don't care. Forrest does it well (but it does need a new skin,... Is there a way to republish only a few pages quickly from Daisy to the online site? Or how hard is that to implement? A very good question - and one of the biggest problems with Forrest site generation at this time. Right now it cannot be done. It could be implemented, sure, but it is not easy, at least with my knowledge of the Cocoon CLI and crawler. The problem is that the crawler will follow all links on the page. Daisy can output a recent changed list, perhaps this could be used to limit the pages generated. A solution that requires no tools work... The Forrest zone is already building the site once a day as part of our docs validation process. Why not just grab the tar, untar, svn up (sounds like a script to me). Without going into a tools discussion, having a quick way to update just the homepage and the news (and maybe an aggregated blog feed) would help us be more active on those pages I guess. If I can add a news item in five minutes I'll do it regularly, if it takes 15 minutes it'll be much less often. Fair point. But is there any need for the news item to be sent to the live server immediately? I don't think so. A daily update will do just fine. For now use the Forrest generated tar, or a maven generated tar if someone sets it up. It will mean that someone in the community will need to log in to the Cocoon zone, execute a script, provide their SVN username and password and logout. I can't think of a faster way without working on the tools. Of course, the problem is who is the *someone*. Might simply be a case of the Forrestbot generating a subset tar.gz instead of the one pointed to by http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/CocoonWebsiteUpdate (http://forrest.zones.apache.org/ seems to be down right now, cannot check it size but I assume it's quite big). No need to download to your local machine, do all the work in the zone.
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Ross Gardler skrev: Daniel Fagerstrom wrote: ... Second we need some (simple) way to suggest news. I think we should suggest possible news items at the dev-list by having a special headers prefix like [news]. I'd suggest just letting (self-registered) people add a news item to Daisy. Committers items will be published automatically, others will require publication by a committer - in daisy this is just a click of a link once logged in. Posting to the list is just a step too many in my view. Why not put it straight in Daisy where it can be edited and published quickly and easily. Don't forget Daisy edits are already sent to the docs list. Sounds good, we should make it as easy as possible to contribute. If someone is unsure if some material is suitable they can ask on the list. Otherwise it is just to go ahead and publish it. I hope that people will post news that are close to being too commercial ;) For such cases we certainly will need to discuss where the limit goes. Third, as the website is our official voice, we need some kind of community oversight. I think lazy consensus should be enough. If no one have protested in maybe three days, we should add the news item to the news page. Of course if someone with marketing skills would like volunteer and take a larger responsibility for creating and editing the news contents that would great. Sure, this all works fine with direct entry into Daisy rather then on the list (where everyone and their dog will chip in but only one or two will actually do anything). Daisy can be configured to only publish items that were written x days ago, thus automatically allowing for lazy consensus. +1 /Daniel
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Bertrand Delacretaz wrote: ... (http://forrest.zones.apache.org/ seems to be down right now, cannot check it size but I assume it's quite big). Grrr, Forrest doesn't have automatic httpd restart and the zones machine goes down a lot. So it is manual restart. I just did it and updated the notes so other committers can do it. http://forrest.apache.org/zone.html#admin -David
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Arje Cahn wrote:
I just have to share my frustrations.
snip/
Arje,
I share your frustrations and agree to many of the points you raised. It's not
that nothing happens - Helma and I made good progress at the GT. See
http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/cdocs/1201.html and
http://people.apache.org/~reinhard/cocoon-docs/1213_1_1.html. We have a working
CMS and an export mechanism based on Maven so that we can meet all requirements
imposed by ASF infra. Read
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=11589400221r=1w=2 to find out more about
the details.
In short, *the tools are working*. What we need is help when it comes to edit
and restructure our docs. If you want to join us, just go to
http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/, look for the part of our documentation
that you want to work on and just do it. BTW, the upcoming main site can be
found at http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/cdocs-site-main/g1/1213.html. If
you don't have the necessary rights, just let us (me) know.
I agree to all your comments about the up-to-dateness. Yes, we need to be more
dynamic, present news and links to our blogs. I will setup a new homepage in and
news page in Daisy ASAP so you and others get an idea.
We probably need some help when it comes to setup an aggregated Cocoon weblog as
it will be difficult for us to run this kind of stuff. Maybe we can setup the
process on our zone and rsync it from somewhere else. Any ideas?
Finally, yes we were talking about some new fancy design for our website but
that's just a piece of the big picture. Unfortunatly this picture consists of
many pieces and we need help at all ends.
--
Reinhard Pötz Independent Consultant, Trainer (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}
web(log): http://www.poetz.cc
___
Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm. Hier gelangen Sie zum neuen Yahoo! Mail: http://mail.yahoo.de
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On Wednesday 18 October 2006 03:51, Steven Noels wrote: What those Belgian guys however (in)frequently murmured amongst themselves was: why the stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for official ASF documentation sites? Why can't cocoon.apache.org simply be a proxy for http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/documentation/ ? I think it is related to the principles of primary resources; - mailing lists - subversion - ? which infrastructure works hard to make sure are operational, backed-up, fail-over, disaster planning et al. Wiki and other stuff is not considered primary, and doesn't enjoy the attention of the infrastructure folks. Cheers Niclas
RE: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Steven said: What those Belgian guys however (in)frequently murmured amongst themselves was: why the stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for official ASF documentation sites? I can see the benefits of having all content (replicated) in SVN. But in principle, yes, there's too much 'stupid fixation' going on anyway. You should have been there when I decided not to wait for Java hosting @ ASF, simply rented a server, and installed JSPWiki under the cocoondev.org domain. Well, as you know, I was kind of there. And I think you did Cocoon a really big favour by doing it in that way. In your stubbornness, you have definitely leveraged the Cocoon community in many ways. I don't want JSPWiki back, either, but there are structural errors in the way the Wiki is organized nowadays. I would like to see some sort of integration between the Wiki and the 'official' website in such a way that they have an accelerating effect on each other. There's (almost BY DEFINITION) too much redundancy and conflicting information in both sites. They've been pulling eachother down for a long time. A differentiation between an official Apache website and a community driven website sounds so paradoxal to me. The 'community driven websites' have helped Cocoon move forward, the 'official' one is the one currently killing it. While I agree with your sentiments, I can only say that things have grown organically into what they are now. It's what the community wanted. Don't get me wrong - I'm not blaming anyone. The community has changed a lot over time, and Cocoon has grown mature. With that, it's clear that some of the original pioneering work is gone, and the focus might better shift to end-users instead of (Apache) developers that instinctively know their way around in the ASF information clutter. A few weeks ago, I was talking with Jeff Turner, with him suggesting that it would be better to suggest Daisy instead of Confluence for incubating ASF projects who are looking for a website management tool. Of course, you would understand that I would not take any position regarding Daisy. :) But whatever it is we need to get things going again, I'm all for it. The Cocoon community has always been really strong, but it's too much centralized on the mailinglists right now. The outside visibility is therefor completely nonexistant. Maybe the discussion is (again?) not about what's going wrong with the Cocoon community, but what's going wrong with what the ASF allows us to do. I don't know about the real bounderies there, so please tell me. - Can we have a Wiki integrated with the Cocoon website? - As such, can we have both in 1 content repository so we can effectively move interesting Wiki pages into the documentation? - Can we display a feed of current activitiy on the mailinglists? Can we display the 10 latest messages on the user/dev list right on the homepage? - Can we have a forum? (Ok, I guess we can't, but maybe there's a way to display the mailinglists in a forum-style way? It's just the visibility I'm talking about) - Can we add blogposts (from committers) to the Cocoon website? - Are we tied to any ASF rules for structure or design of our website? - Can we have 'subsites' hosted below the official Cocoon website? Aka, the CocoonGT website? Just some thoughts.. Arjé
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Thanks Arje for starting this thread. And, despite your (justified) negative view on the current state of our website, big thanks to those who have been investing lots of time trying to make it happen over the years. Few of us have been really paying attention, it's easy to make a lot of noise now about our site sucking now (nothing against you Arje, I'm speaking in general terms). Our (collective) ambitions have often not been matched by our (individual) efforts. The history of the http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/CocoonWebsiteUpdate page says a lot about this, and Steven's efforts in getting a decent wiki going, at the time, are to be noticed as well - big thanks. If we can think in small steps instead of throwing out all our tools as we tend to do in such situations, I'd suggest simply finding a way to make the http://cocoon.apache.org/ homepage more alive, by making it easy and quick for us to update it indepentendly of the other pages. Heck, editing a static page might be good enough, or running an XSLT transform locally to generate it from a blog-like news XML file in order to have an RSS news feed as well. Add to this a link to a blog aggregator (planetcocoon.org?) for cocoon-related posts by members of this community, and we'd have much more life on our website already, with little effort. -Bertrand
RE: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Bertrand said: Thanks Arje for starting this thread. :-) And, despite your (justified) negative view on the current state of our website, big thanks to those who have been investing lots of time trying to make it happen over the years. Few of us have been really paying attention, it's easy to make a lot of noise now about our site sucking now (nothing against you Arje, I'm speaking in general terms). I totally agree with you. It sure is easy to say the website sucks :) I'd suggest simply finding a way to make the http://cocoon.apache.org/ homepage more alive Yes! Add to this a link to a blog aggregator (planetcocoon.org?) for cocoon-related posts by members of this community, and we'd have much more life on our website already, with little effort. Absolutely! But - and I'm gonna be a real pain in the butt about this - it should *not* be at planetcocoon.org. It should be at cocoon.apache.org. We need to give visitors something to look at, at the place where they start looking (see my first email). This is NOT AGAIN another website, it should be the Cocoon main website. Arje
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 10/18/06, Arje Cahn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...This is NOT AGAIN another website, it should be the Cocoon main website... Cool - if you can be enough of a pain to make this happen, I'll put you on my I-owe-you-a-beer list ;-) -Bertrand
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Bertrand Delacretaz said the following on 18/10/06 13:56: Thanks Arje for starting this thread. +1 Guys, since the documentation is my main focus, I want to chime in here. Re the redesign of the website: I haven't discussed this much with Reinhard, but my intention was a new revamped website once 2.2 is released. Revamped does not only include new shiny looks, but IMO also a restructuring of the info and a more lively homepage. When Daisy was put up on the zones as our main documentation repository, I had already planned for a restructuring, but arguments that the URL space had to be preserved prevented this. So I decided to comply and wait for 2.2. Re the information is all over the place: I fully agree and since I became committer I've tried several times to get the role of at least the website and the wiki clear. I won't bother now to find all these threads. The discussions either turned into yet another tooling proposal or faded out when other more code-related topics appeared. My own lack of time and the fact that I wasn't able to motivate/scare/bribe/kick the rest of the community into writing documentation hasn't added much to the process. I do have to say that this didn't boost my motivation either. I know that open source projects thrive on voluntary work and that we should be grateful for all the work that's contributed, but I cannot dismiss the feeling that documentation is generally considered to be done by someone else, while we all curse the moment when we turn to the documentation and find it inadequate. I know that the current process of updating the cocoon.apache.org website is cumbersome, but still it's a whole lot better than the previous process. I really don't care if it takes one step or twenty, if in the end all I need to do is set a timer that reminds me to provide my username/password to start the update process every X days, I'd be glad to do that. However, that doesn't make sense when nobody bothers to write. Moving over the legacy documentation at the time was done with reuse in mind. However, that means that people, knowledgable of the topic, have to go over it and verify it. No such actions, give or take a few, have been done. Several people have written how documentation should be written and when I read the recent version I bitterly remembered reading almost identical stuff written by Dianne Shannon way back then. However, only few actual pages have been written. I've spent both Hackathon days implementing the documentation infrastructure Reinhard has designed. Although I see some advantages in his setup, I didn't feel any pride over it. I merely contributed to more metadata, no actual documentation. This is where I think the main problem lies: - discussions on documentation on the mailinglists swerve off topic and into tooling and code before the fifth reply is in. - documentation is regarded as something evil/boring/without merits or whatever I agree with Bertrand that we should take small steps, but let's define the steps first and agree on this, put them up somewhere and stick to them. Let's not wait for the miracle of self-describing documentation, or the overall genius (me ;-) ) that can write it overnight. Let's simply agree that it's part of the job and should be done as well. For all the roadmaps that have been written, discussed and discarded, let us now finally write one for the documentation and stick to it. Use some of your code hacking time to write documentation. Don't wait for others to do, be the first to write. If you think documentation has to be perfect in the first instance, you're wrong. The only thing necessary is the correctness of the information. If you write it down in notes, full of spelling errors and grammar clashes, nobody cares and I'd be glad to go over it and polish it up. My proposal is: I start several new threads regarding the documentation on this mailinglist. Each thread contains a single topic, e.g. position of wiki vs Daisy, documentation structure, documentation roadmap. We can discuss the various ideas but WE REMAIN ON TOPIC or start a new thread. The end result should be one or more documents in Daisy that express our consensus on what the documentation should look like and how each community member can contribute and which rules we have to live by (e.g. no code release unless there is sufficient documentation). And once we agree (whether through voting or through general consensus I don't care), we stick to it and follow it through. Sorry if this sounds a bit emotional, but that's how I feel. Bye, Helma
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
hepabolu wrote: I know that the current process of updating the cocoon.apache.org website is cumbersome, but still it's a whole lot better than the previous process. I really don't care if it takes one step or twenty, if in the end all I need to do is set a timer that reminds me to provide my username/password to start the update process every X days, I'd be glad to do that. However, that doesn't make sense when nobody bothers to write. And that, as most of us know, is the real problem. It really makes no difference how easy/hard documentation and publishing is. It just doesn't happen. For those new to this kind of discussion just check the archives - the solution proposed is always tools (and I've done it myself in the past). The new tools arrive and still there is no documentation. Ross
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Arje Cahn skrev: ... The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I feel there are much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened out before the shinyness of our website is of any importance. We need to decide where we put what, as it's currently spread all over the place: Cocoon website, mailinglists, the Wiki, blogs, zones.apache, Daisy documentation, etc etc... Can agree that design isn't the highest priority. Neither the less it is important and it is the first thing that meats the eyes of a newcomer. The current design is something that we (thanks to the popularity of Forrest) shares with hundreds of sites. So everybody have seen it before. As we would like to think of Cocoon as something unique we shouldn't look like everybody else. So if we have people in the community who have the talent do do something about it, we should wholeheartedly support such efforts. So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon website :-) - Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 entries on the page, spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally sucks! For a newcomer, this is not a good sign. It would really help, if we got someone to add 1 news entry every month, with 3 lines minimum. We've recently added a bunch of committers to the project, which is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's put it on there! Agree, we have plenty of activity in our community, so a couple of news items per month would be a much better reflection of our reality. So how do we achieve this? First I think we need some common idea about what is a news item. Some suggestions would be: * New releases (with separate releases of the blocks there should be plenty of things to report) * Cocoon GT and ApacheCon and other conferences with Cocoon presentations * Links to articles about or mentioning Cocoon and any other media coverage * New products and (larger) sites using Cocoon * New committers and ASF members with short presentations (Cocoon is a strong and active community and that should be visible) * New bloggs with Cocoon focus * Important new features or developments * Important discussions on the mail lists More ideas? Second we need some (simple) way to suggest news. I think we should suggest possible news items at the dev-list by having a special headers prefix like [news]. Third, as the website is our official voice, we need some kind of community oversight. I think lazy consensus should be enough. If no one have protested in maybe three days, we should add the news item to the news page. Of course if someone with marketing skills would like volunteer and take a larger responsibility for creating and editing the news contents that would great. - NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the homepage. I mean, look at *any* commercial website and see how many clicks you need to get to the news and marketing yadayada. Agree completely. Let's imagine a first time visitor to our site. The reason that she got to our site is probably that she has heard or read about Cocoon and follow a link from another site or a search machine to learn more. What will create most motivation for actually learning more about Cocoon, an fairly abstract description about what Cocoon is or lots of news items showing that this is the place where the action is ;) And the returning visitor already know what Cocoon is, so for her it is much more interesting to learn what is new and what happens. It must of course be easy to find information about what Cocoon is, but it shouldn't be the main content of the home page. On the homepage it should be enough with one or two sentences about what it is. Take a look at Spring e.g. own visual design and it starts with: Welcome to the home of the Spring Framework. As the leading full-stack Java/J2EE application framework, Spring delivers significant benefits for many projects, reducing development effort and costs while improving test coverage and quality. And then they continue with lots of news. That shows self confidence! So why are we explain how it is: Welcome to the home of the Cocoon Framework. As the leading XML/Java web application framework, Cocoon delivers significant benefits for many projects, reducing development effort and costs while improving test coverage and quality. ;) ... - Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this dream was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever. How embarissing it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our docs. This has everything to do with the total invisibility of the documentation website. Let's bring it out into the spotlights. Let's give every committer a login, or better yet, get Daisy to talk to the ASF's authentication server (free advice Belgian
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Daniel Fagerstrom wrote: we have plenty of activity in our community, so a couple of news items per month would be a much better reflection of our reality. So how do we achieve this? Some options (which don't require new tools): Daisy can be used to create blog like pages that can be automatically brought together into a news page. I agree that it should be the home page, but Daisy would not limit the info to just this page. Perhaps 3 items on the home page, and a larger news only page. Note that Daisy can also be made to create RSS feeds, but that's a next step. Alternatively, have the site generation pull content from peoples existing blogs. Forrest has a plugin for this (although it is pretty basic), I'm sure Maven can be made to do it. The problem with this approach is that there is no control over the content that is published. Of course there are lots of other ways, but they involve new tools so I'm steering away form those. First I think we need some common idea about what is a news item. Some suggestions would be: All your suggestions look just fine, I'm sure having an exhaustive list is impossible, but your list is a great starting point. I'm more concerned about *who* will write these items and who will publish the site frequently. It really is a case of providing a login and password to a publishing tool after it is configured. Which publishing tool to use? I don't care. Forrest does it well (but it does need a new skin, there is a partially complete skin that Helma and I put together some time ago, but I have not had the time to finish it off yet. Second we need some (simple) way to suggest news. I think we should suggest possible news items at the dev-list by having a special headers prefix like [news]. I'd suggest just letting (self-registered) people add a news item to Daisy. Committers items will be published automatically, others will require publication by a committer - in daisy this is just a click of a link once logged in. Posting to the list is just a step too many in my view. Why not put it straight in Daisy where it can be edited and published quickly and easily. Don't forget Daisy edits are already sent to the docs list. Third, as the website is our official voice, we need some kind of community oversight. I think lazy consensus should be enough. If no one have protested in maybe three days, we should add the news item to the news page. Of course if someone with marketing skills would like volunteer and take a larger responsibility for creating and editing the news contents that would great. Sure, this all works fine with direct entry into Daisy rather then on the list (where everyone and their dog will chip in but only one or two will actually do anything). Daisy can be configured to only publish items that were written x days ago, thus automatically allowing for lazy consensus. --- I support the above as a small step, I think it may encourage more people into using Daisy a little. Ross
[RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Hi all, I just have to share my frustrations. oOo- I got 2 emails from people that were very disappointed that they both missed out on the GT because they were only watching the Cocoon website. One of them mentioned that his manager no longer wants him to use Cocoon since the project website is dead. These two people were visitors of last year's event, and I'm pretty sure that there would've been many more people that missed out because they don't read the mailinglists. First of all, let me start by saying that I've made a really big mistake in not updating the Cocoon website with news about the Cocoon GetTogether. Although the Wiki does mention it, as well as the mailinglists, the Cocoon website has no news to share. But it appeared to me anyway that the Cocoon news page is actually never actually really read. (how stupid of me) For example, if you take a look at http://cocoon.apache.org/news/index.html, it says pretty much nothing. Of course, I'll have to blame myself for not putting the GT on the website. Which I do. But I must say that I've been working my ass off to get the GT done, and I'm just a little bit disappointed that no one else came up with the idea of putting it up on the website. Alright, I know, it's entirely my fault. On the other hand, there's been the occasional blogposts (thanks!), and Carsten had some postings in German magazines, but that was just about it. Compare this with the 30 something people that Carsten got at (both) his talks in Austin, and the 50 something in Dublin. Add to that the 90 people attending the Cocoon GT of which 80% were totally unrelated to the Cocoon 'family'. There's still a lot of interest in Cocoon from the outside world - we just do not leverage it! And then there's the really kind words that I got from Apache board guys at the ApacheCon in Austin. Why is it so hard to drive 300 attendees to Austin for a big conference on ALL Apache projects, covered by a huge budget, big names and big sponsors, while we seem to easily reach 100 people every year for a silly little conference in Europe without *any* serious budget??! I mean, Cocoon was supposed to be OBSOLETE, wasn't it? BTW, thanks for putting up the ApacheCon logo's on the Cocoon site. Neat. oOo- The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I feel there are much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened out before the shinyness of our website is of any importance. We need to decide where we put what, as it's currently spread all over the place: Cocoon website, mailinglists, the Wiki, blogs, zones.apache, Daisy documentation, etc etc... oOo- So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon website :-) - Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 entries on the page, spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally sucks! For a newcomer, this is not a good sign. It would really help, if we got someone to add 1 news entry every month, with 3 lines minimum. We've recently added a bunch of committers to the project, which is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's put it on there! - NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the homepage. I mean, look at *any* commercial website and see how many clicks you need to get to the news and marketing yadayada. - Add Cocoon blogs to the Cocoon website (don't know if that would be a legal issue, but it would surely add fuzz). Only the Apache incrowd reads planetapache - it's just too far away from the Cocoon website. Let's move it there where the community is. Just see the Ruby on Rails website. Why the dull Cocoon move on, nothing is happening here look? - Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this dream was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever. How embarissing it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our docs. This has everything to do with the total invisibility of the documentation website. Let's bring it out into the spotlights. Let's give every committer a login, or better yet, get Daisy to talk to the ASF's authentication server (free advice Belgian guys). - The Cocoon Wiki went DEAD as soon as it was moved to Moinmoin. What a sin. It might have been for political reasons, I don't know. I believe the Cocoon Wiki was once the brightest, most innovative and fun place to be if you wanted to get your hands dirty with Cocoon. Whatever happened to the navigation bar we used to have in JSPWiki?? Please! Let's put it back. I don't think I'm the stupidest person on earth, but ever since the Moinmoin Wiki was launched I've NEVER found ANYTHING interesting on it anymore. - Make stuff easy to find on our website.. Without going into details, too many things are hidden too far away. I'm very sure there's hardly any newcomer
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
On 17 Oct 2006, at 20:05, Arje Cahn wrote: - Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this dream was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever. How embarissing it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our docs. This has everything to do with the total invisibility of the documentation website. Let's bring it out into the spotlights. Let's give every committer a login, or better yet, get Daisy to talk to the ASF's authentication server (free advice Belgian guys). Oh, if anyone would care, here's the documentation to get such a thing started: http://cocoondev.org/daisydocs-1_5/repository/general/ 37.html and here's a sample: http://svn.cocoondev.org/viewsvn/trunk/ daisy/services/ntlm-auth/ Yes, we have pluggable authentication schemes. You don't need Belgian guys for such little glue jobs, but we would be happy to help anyone with questions. What those Belgian guys however (in)frequently murmured amongst themselves was: why the stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for official ASF documentation sites? Why can't cocoon.apache.org simply be a proxy for http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/documentation/ ? - The Cocoon Wiki went DEAD as soon as it was moved to Moinmoin. What a sin. It might have been for political reasons, I don't know. JSPWiki used to be a memory-leaking piece of crap so I was happy when the MoinMoin migration became a possibility. You should have been there when I decided not to wait for Java hosting @ ASF, simply rented a server, and installed JSPWiki under the cocoondev.org domain. Instant success, and instant FUD whether my ambitions with that domain were upto ASF standards. It took me a while to forget that. I believe the Cocoon Wiki was once the brightest, most innovative and fun place to be if you wanted to get your hands dirty with Cocoon. Whatever happened to the navigation bar we used to have in JSPWiki?? Please! Let's put it back. I don't think I'm the stupidest person on earth, but ever since the Moinmoin Wiki was launched I've NEVER found ANYTHING interesting on it anymore. While I agree with your sentiments, I can only say that things have grown organically into what they are now. It's what the community wanted. A few weeks ago, I was talking with Jeff Turner, with him suggesting that it would be better to suggest Daisy instead of Confluence for incubating ASF projects who are looking for a website management tool. While I'm sympathetic to the idea (obviously), I'm extremely reluctant to move into such a direction, as my time to support such a thing is limited these days, and the ASF infrastructure peeps are of the more demanding type. It's been suggested before, but I stopped considering and started laughing when one of the prerequisites was to replace our own storage layer with SVN. Oh well. /Steven -- Steven Noelshttp://outerthought.org/ Outerthought Open Source Java XML stevenn at outerthought.orgstevenn at apache.org
Re: [RANT] The Cocoon website: move on, nothing is happening here
Arje Cahn wrote: I just have to share my frustrations. Thanks for this! The discussion about a new design for our website is great, but I feel there are much bigger mistakes that we have to get straightened out before the shinyness of our website is of any importance. We need to decide where we put what, as it's currently spread all over the place: Cocoon website, mailinglists, the Wiki, blogs, zones.apache, Daisy documentation, etc etc... It's certainly true that there is a lot of old doc 'crap' still floating around, but i think it's pretty clear that daisy has the most up to date content, is by far the easiest to get something written on and consequently quite frequently updated (can we have a show of hands on how many people know how to update the cocoon website ? __without__ looking at the howto ? ) But as you say, it's too hidden. So: Steven Noels wrote: stupid fixation with SVN as a required content repository for official ASF documentation sites? Why can't cocoon.apache.org simply be a proxy for http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/daisy/documentation/ ? Yes, why not? If it's not allowed we should replace the homepage of all those sites with a simple redirect. To be somehow ASF compliant we do a daily daisy-blob dump, bzip it and commit to SVN. Simple. And if that's not compliant enough we create a trigger of some sort that does this everytime someone adds/modifies content. So here's my list of things that TOTALLY SUCK about the Cocoon website :-) - Someone has to maintain the Cocoon News page. There are now 4 entries on the page, spanning a total 2 years of news. That totally sucks! For a newcomer, this is not a good sign. It would really help, if we got someone to add 1 news entry every month, with 3 lines minimum. We've recently added a bunch of committers to the project, which is perfect to show that we're not DEAD. Let's put it on there! again, the threshold for doing this is too high 1) svn co'ing the xdocs or whatever format the website is in, 2) figuring out how to add an item and make it look good without messing up everything else. Let's not even think about a possible content restructure. 3) figuring out how to publish the site (forrest? forrestbot?) locally first to see what it looks like 4) i don't even remember what to do next - NEWS should be on the HOMEPAGE, not 2 clicks away from the homepage. I mean, look at *any* commercial website and see how many clicks you need to get to the news and marketing yadayada. see my previous point. - Documentation (sorry, Helma). So, it was Stefano's dream to once have a Cocoon CMS and run the Cocoon website with it. I don't think part of this dream was to tuck it away on a hidden location so it will be forgotten forever. How embarissing it is to see Helma working at the GT practically alone on all our docs. This has everything to do with the total invisibility of the documentation website. Let's So let's make it more visible. See my previous comment about pointing all current resources to daisy. - And finally, I feel so sorry for www.planetcocoon.com and www.spreadcocoon.com. Same probably goes for zones.apache, cocoondev.org, and all the other nice initiatives people have both planetcocoon and spreadcocoon have reached the stage of near absolute stasis. I mean, thanks Mark Leicester for the great effort back then, but it just didn't float and at this point they only contribute to the perception that cocoon is dead. I'm all for consistency, so if Mark would be so kind and we all agree: let's replace their homepages with a redirect to daisy. 1 location where people actually start to look when they are searching for Cocoon: cocoon.apache.org. And we need regular changes on there. we can argue about the domain name, but the content should be driven and managed from daisy. Just my 0.02EUR, Jorg
