Re: [boost] Maintaining boost.org

Subject: Re: [boost] Maintaining boost.org
From: Rene Rivera (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-24 10:41:11

On 5/24/2010 12:09 AM, Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> If you were at the BoostCon 2010 panel session, I suggested that
> maintaining boost.org can be a less painful process and that I was
> willing to help out in transitioning the current site from the way it
> is currently set up to maybe use Wordpress to host the site. There are
> other options that I would like to explore only after looking at many
> different tools and the current process of maintaining it.

There are a few things that might be difficult to achieve when 
implementing the website in a CMS.

> I tried sending mail to the Boost-docs list but I haven't gotten any
> responses yet so I chose to send another email to the developers
> mailing list.

Hm, I don't an email on the docs list :-\ I'll cross post to the docs 
list just in case it ever show up.

> There are a couple of questions I would like to ask and
> would really appreciated getting an answer about:
>
> 1. Is there currently a boost.org web team? If so, who are in the team?

Right now it would be Daniel James, Beman Dawes (for the release docs), 
regular library authors, and myself. Although Daniel has essential done 
all of it.. Since there really isn't that much to do. I think he's spent 
idle time rewriting some pf the PHP scripts from the rather nasty code I 
originally wrote ;-)

> 2. What is the current process of building the boost.org site? What is
> the toolchain used and how are changes managed?

When I designed it I wanted to use existing "tools" that developers 
already knew how to use. Hence most of the web site is plain HTML. Parts 
are PHP HTML with supporting PHP class code, for example the libraries 
list and online documentation. The feeds, i.e. downloads and news, are 
Quickbook docs that get translated to Docbook and then filtered with a 
Python script to generate static RSS. They are displayed in the site by 
PHP from reading the RSS and doing minor translation to HTML. The big 
chunk of PHP code deals with the documentation. When looking at the 
documentation pages a PHP script looks up pages directly on the Boost 
release ZIP archive of a given version, uncompresses the file, 
optionally post-processes it into HTML to fit the style (mostly just 
replaces the header&footer), and spits out the docs. Hopefully you've 
already found the web-site dev instructions 
<http://www.boost.org/development/website_updating.html>.

> Before I go into the detail of a proposal of making boost.org a little
> more "interactive" and "inclusive" I would first like to know the
> state of the system and whether there are any low hanging fruit that
> can be taken care of before I even suggest changing it.
>
> FWIW, I volunteer to help manage boost.org to make it more inviting to
> the community and more dynamic than it currently is. Although the
> boost.org website does host the web-based library documentation, I
> would like to be able to see more information on it about the
> community, the process, and news on what's going on.
>
> Pending a "full" proposal I would definitely appreciate thoughts about
> the matter too.

One idea I had, before Boostcon when the whole where should Boost go 
discussion came up, was to move to using something like the Drupal model 
for sub-projects <http://drupal.org/project/Modules>. Particularly how 
the projects each have their own web area. And also how the groups 
section area of Drupal works <http://groups.drupal.org/>.

Note, I'm not suggesting Drupal (even if I do currently use it). Just 
some of the structure they employ for projects since it does mirror the 
conglomerate project structure Boost has.

-- 
-- Grafik - Don't Assume Anything
-- Redshift Software, Inc. - http://redshift-software.com
-- rrivera/acm.org (msn) - grafik/redshift-software.com
-- 102708583/icq - grafikrobot/aim,yahoo,skype,efnet,gmail