As most of you will be aware, the main SLUG website has not had
any -- user visible -- design changes in many years (according to
some estimates since about 1996).
While stability is a good thing, newness never hurts.
Accordingly SLUG is looking at different designs for the main website
and/or using different technologies, apart from static web pages, to
get us there.
We'd like to invite any SLUG member with an interest in participating
to join the web-devel mailling list [1], and provide some input to
the committee members looking at this issue (presently Jeff Waugh,
Angus Lees, Chris Collins and Conrad Parker).
For those of you who might want to know what the current site looks
like I've made a copy (as of 01 May 2001) in [2].
What has already been discussed is the database to be used (PostGres)
and the languages available (PHP, mason, emperl). However the general
consensus was "show me the code".
Note you won't have access to the SLUG machine just because you've
expressed interest -- you'll need to demonstrate what you can do.
The web group already has some preliminary design constraints:
1. The main types of dynamic content discussed were announcements of
upcoming events (meetings, fests etc), and news relevent to Sluggers,
and anyone using Linux in Sydney (but NOT general geek news, headlines
etc).
2. The events should be hooked up to a calendar, so people can get an
overview of what is coming up and what events have been on recently --
ie. the front page shows the next event or two, and a more detailed
calendar page(s) gives a longer term view.
3. As the upcoming events thing is more important (in terms of
persistence) than other news, it should be a separate section prominent
on the front page (ie. so you can always find out about the next meeting
by checking the front page).
Further constraint refinement and code development will likely take place
on the web-devel list.
Thanks,
Anand
[1]: <URL: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/web-devel>
[2]: <URL: http://slug.org.au/slug-site.tar.gz>, 13Mb
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