Re: [boost] Changing the website (Was: Need help with bootstrap.bat)

Subject: Re: [boost] Changing the website (Was: Need help with bootstrap.bat)
From: Stefan Seefeld (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-01-03 17:04:20

On 03.01.2018 11:47, Robert Ramey via Boost wrote:
> On 1/3/18 6:14 AM, Daniel James via Boost wrote:
> > On 3 January 2018 at 13:27, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost
> > <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >>
> >> I consider this more important than where actually the content is
> hosted.
> >
> > Sure, but from my perspective the problem is that no one is
> > maintaining a lot of these pages. If there's a simple way to make it
> > easier for other people to do it, then I'd like to explore that.
> > Making proposals to reorganize the website is nice, but is anyone
> > going to do it?
> The whole website thing is ripe for some really great idea. We need
> some new ideas/approaches here.
>
> a) It has to be composed of simpler more orthogonal parts
> b) Each of which can be easily and sort of maintained by a large
> number of individuals who have responsabiity for their own parts
> c) It has to be easy to do
> d) Use simple tools which are going to be around for a while
> e) Create a shared UI/css, etc so that understanding one part means
> that a user understands the other parts, etc.
> f) It has to address security issues
> g) It would be nice to have the ability for users to add information
> to web pages - corrections etc.  Maybe git hub issues would work for
> this.
>
> I don't know anything which really encompasses all of the above, but
> there are somethings which have good/helpful models for some aspects
> of the above.

If we always seek to remodel everything at once we make life
unnecessarily hard for ourselves. It's much easier and more pragmatic to
look for incremental improvements. And it brings me back to my favourite
topic: modularity.
github already allows per-project pages, and some of the github projects
use them (e.g. http://boostorg.github.io/python/). So let's assume for a
moment that all Boost projects use github pages to publish their
documentation. The remainder of `www.boost.org` could then be migrated
to github pages, too, mostly consisting of references to the
project-specific pages.

I think such a scenario meets most of your items above: it's modular
("composed of orthogonal parts"), more easily maintained (each by their
project's maintainers).
(I'd leave out the discussion about tools etc., as I think that's
entirely up to the projects.)

But, as usual, some people will insist that such modularization is bad,
so it's an all-or-nothing thing, and in the end, nothing will change.

However, if there was motivation to try out something like the above,
I'd be more than happy to help.

Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...