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.
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I support the above as a "small step", I think it may encourage more
people into using Daisy a little.
Ross
