On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 8:16 AM, Kevin LaTona <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I've got plenty of personal projects to work on.
>
> But for while now I have been thinking that SeaPig's website could use a
> refresh to make it a little bit more hip and elegant looking on the UI side
> of things.

That is an idea. Maybe we can have a group brainstorm ideas for part
of the time, and then work on our other projects.

> Maybe we could this use Tornado, Flask or Pyramid as a backend framework.
>
> Redo parts of the site's UI on the frontside with some nice HTML and a bit
> of jQuery.
>
> And still use the wiki for the other parts of the site where the wiki is
> really needed and best used.

I would start with the visual look and desired functionality first,
and then discuss which technologies could fulfill it. It's also worth
looking at, which pieces are being hindered by the incumbent system,
MoinMoin? For instance, i imagine MoinMoin allows changing the
stylesheet to whatever we want or adding Javascript? My general
impression is that Wiki syntaxes are annoyingly esoteric and limited,
but there's no particular dynamic feature I'm missing. We've bounced
around the idea of a calendar, but nobody has specified exactly what
the calendar should do or what the implications are for the SeaPIG
site. (Should it run a calendar-something, and if so what, or should
it link to a friendly cloud service?)

As for technology, I of course favor Pyramid for server-side stuff and
would resist anything else because I'd be afraid it may be limiting in
the future. For client-side stuff, I've heard widespread praise for
JQuery, moreso than for any other Javascript thingy, so I would start
with (1) what do we want, and (2) can JQuery do it well, or (3) or
would something else do it better and has been around for a while? Re
webservers, we need name-based virtual hosting so it would have to be
something that does that. Apache is installed. We could consider
something else, although if it's async, it would have to not preclude
running another multithreaded webapp concurrently, as I might want to
do that in the future.

Overall I would look toward technologies that have been around a while
or are descended from code that has been around a while. The SeaPIG
site needs to be maintainable long-term, not using a new and possibly
short-lived fad. Those would be best for experimental sites, which we
can certainly do as another activity, or for an autonomous
side-feature for the site.

So how many people would like to discuss changes to the SeaPIG site on
Monday, or should we do it later when people have more notice?

-- 
Mike Orr <[email protected]>

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