On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 9:54 PM, Dave Fisher <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sep 28, 2012, at 10:12 AM, Kay Schenk wrote: > >> Thanks for this feedback Rob...good observations to say the least...see >> inline >> >> On 09/27/2012 05:57 PM, Rob Weir wrote: >>> Kay has started a page on the wiki to list possible areas where we can >>> improve the website: >>> >>> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=30737243 >>> >>> One of the ideas concerned the little news stories that we put on the home >>> page. >>> >>> Since I think I'm the only one that has been maintaining this part of >>> the website, let me explain how it works today, and why that sucks. >>> >>> When it comes time to add a new story I do the following: >>> >>> 1) Edit the home page via the CMS >>> >>> 1a) Add a new story at the top >>> 1b) Remove the oldest story from the bottom and move it to another >>> file, news/index.html >>> >>> (This is especially annoying because 1a and 1b are structured >>> differently, so it is not a simple cut & paste) >> >> I had explored recently the idea of just putting ALL the news items on >> news/index.html and then just dumping that via ssi into that right column >> with some appropriate formatting -- the css equivalent of frames. Infra >> didn't seem too jazzed about enabling ssi for the site although I see it's >> used to a certain extent in our headers (???). This would save us the >> duplicate editing, moving etc. > > Infra actually suggested that we start doing ssi to avoid "seldgehammer > changes". SSI is how we do branding, headers, footers and the topnav. All of > it is SSI. We should do it for news. It will take slightly special efforts to > keep that part from being wrapped. That will need to be in > ooo-site/trunk/lib/path.pm - take a look. >
What makes this different from our other SSI uses is we need to limit the number of articles displayed. We want to avoid having an open-ended list of articles appear on the home page, since that would just length the page and put the important footer info far down. It would be ugly as well. So ideally we want some logic that puts the 5 or so most recent stories on the home page, and then puts the full list of articles on the dedicated news page. Or maybe even does something fancier, like group articles by month or year on the news page. But minimum requirement is probably to be able to limit number of articles on home page. Is this something that is easy/possible to do with the way we're using the CMS? -Rob > Regards, > Dave > >> >>> >>> 2) Send summaries of the news story out via Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc. >>> >>> We could probably do better than this. For example we could do all >>> news stories via our existing project blog. That removes the need for >>> a page of archival news stories, since Roller provides that. We could >>> retrieve and parse the RSS or Atom feed for the blog to populate the >>> home page. And there are services to autopost things to Twitter, >>> etc., from a feed as well. >>> >>> Or this could be done from the other direction. We could do all short >>> news items via Twitter and then just do a Twitter stream on the home >>> page. >>> >>> Or we could have a feed XML that we check into SVN and display on home page. >> >> This last one sounds promising... >> >>> >>> These are all variations of "one feed to rule them all". There are >>> several variations on this basic idea. >>> >>> Perhaps this would be an interesting small project for someone in the >>> community? >> >> Your ideas are good, and it would be great if someone could lead this >> investigation. >> >>> >>> Regards, >>> >>> -Rob >>> >> >> -- >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> MzK >> >> "Just 'cause you got the monkey off your back >> doesn't mean the circus has left town." >> -- George Carlin >
