Hi,

Terri, thanks for your comments. (More to come later?)

Here's another attempt to improve Mailman:

Subscription Page Redesign: http://gnu.mailman.googlepages.com/Mailman-Subscription-Page-Redesign.ta.gz

Again, feedback is welcome.

• Satoshi

2008/3/12, Terri Oda <terri@zone12.com>:

On 10-Mar-08, at 11:10 PM, Satoshi Tanabe wrote:

...

This site tries to solve the problems that I listed in the following document:

What's wrong with the current Mailman official site? http://gnu.mailman.googlepages.com/wrong.txt

I'd love to have your feedback. Also, I listed several questions in the document above, so I'd appreciate if any of you could answer or comment on them (Some questions are not about the official site per se).

I haven't had a chance to seriously look at all the content or your comments and questions, but wow, you do seem to be spot on about simplifying the webpage being an improvement!

I'd like to sit down and nitpick some stuff, but I know I won't have time this week, so for now I just want to say that I'm very much in favour of using this as a springboard to redesign the main site.

Terri

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:08:57PM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

One other question you raise: I would like to move the bug trackers
off of SourceForge at some point. I think Jira is no longer a viable
option, so we should consider alternatives. Once again, Launchpad
seems a natural

Launchpad++

Slowness aside, that platform looks like a perfect fit.

If people reeeaaaally don't like that idea, I know a certain .org that might host other tracking software for the mailman team....

Cheers,

Cristóbal Palmer ibiblio.org systems administrator

Barry Warsaw writes:

There doesn't seem to have been much debate on this, but I'm up for
moving it. I think the two options at this point are probably
Launchpad or trying to get a Roundup instance up on python.org. I
think Martin just did something similar for setuptools so he might be
open to helping us get one for Mailman.

I don't necessarily advocate this path for Mailman, but I'm doing a Roundup tracker for XEmacs and would be able to help with it if that's the way you want to go.

I'd like to get Mark's feedback on this since he's been doing most of
the bug closing these days (to my shame).

Why waste time on being ashamed of yourself when you could be proud of the job Mark's been doing instead?<wink>

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Barry Warsaw wrote: | On Apr 20, 2008, at 6:04 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: |> Barry Warsaw writes: | |>> I'd like to get Mark's feedback on this since he's been doing most of |>> the bug closing these days (to my shame). |> Why waste time on being ashamed of yourself when you could be proud of |> the job Mark's been doing instead?<wink> | | Good point! :)

Thanks guys.

As far as trackers are concerned, I'm pretty much agnostic. I like the idea of Launchpad because it keeps the code and the tracker together, but I'm not really familiar with the features of either Roundup or the Launchpad tracker, so I'd defer to those who know more about them for a decision.

Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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Thanks Barry for your comments and thoughts. I waited for your reply :-)

Several comments on what you said:

• I used gedit to create all the html files, so "pages being build using non-free software" is not an issue at least with my part.

• As you pointed out, which Wiki to use, whether to use a non-free wiki service, and which content should be placed in the wiki site all remain an issue.

• All color scheme is defined in the CSS file, so changing the color scheme should be trivial. (And no, I'm not insisting using green instead of the current color scheme :-) It just happened to be.)

• Thanks for the comment on the Jira no longer being an option. I'll update that part.

• Satoshi

2008/4/9, Barry Warsaw <barry@list.org>:

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On Mar 10, 2008, at 11:10 PM, Satoshi Tanabe wrote:

...

Currently I'm creating an unofficial site of GNU Mailman. It's not done yet, but the goal is to make the current official site more accessible and usable. The content is almost the same.

Satoshi, this is very cool. I'm sorry for not responding sooner, but I think it would be great to flesh these ideas out more, probably with Terri's help.

I think you've accurately identified some of the problems with the current web site. It's also true that we're building it with 1996 technology and web design sensibility (not unlike Mailman's web u/i ;).

I do think it's important to consider that the tools used to build the site be free software. I'd like people to be able to hack the web building tools just like they can hack the software.

It's also important to consider what information is better suited for the wiki and what is better suited for the static main site. I agree that there's a lot of duplication of information, and I tend to think that a large amount of that belongs on the wiki instead. Relying heavily on the wiki[1] allows the entire community to participate, and as Terri has shown, even the documentation written on the wiki can be exported to other formats that are more easily printed.

I would like to keep some of the same color schemes and logos we currently use, unless there is a strong desire to update them. I still like the logo though. :)

One other question you raise: I would like to move the bug trackers off of SourceForge at some point. I think Jira is no longer a viable option, so we should consider alternatives. Once again, Launchpad seems a natural, but I'm open to suggestions, given our constraints (we don't currently have the resources to maintain our own tracker instances).

• -Barry

[1] Admittedly the wiki is not running on free software. As much as I like Confluence, this is an issue for a GNU project like Mailman. However, again I don't think we yet have the resources to maintain our own wiki, let alone import the existing content into a free wiki. IMO, having a non-free wiki is more useful to the community than not having a wiki at all, but I'm open to volunteers coming forward to help rectify the situation.

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Barry Warsaw writes:

Maybe not though. Ideally, most of the www content really could live
on the wiki. We'd lose the mirrors, but I'm not really sure how much
value there is in them anyway. Radical thought: with a front page we
can better design, and pages we can lock down from editing, can www be
completely wiki?

Why not? One thing that would be nice for this kind of thing would be a wiki that lives on top of a VCS, with page sources on "official" and "public-editable" branches. The idea of the "official" manual is that this is created by developers (preferably by merging from the public branch :-), and is the source for the next distribution manual.

I don't think this wiki exists yet, though.

Hello,

2008/4/20, Barry Warsaw <barry@list.org>:

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On Apr 9, 2008, at 12:28 AM, Satoshi Tanabe wrote:

...

Thanks Barry for your comments and thoughts. I waited for your reply :-)

Several comments on what you said:

• I used gedit to create all the html files, so "pages being build using non-free software" is not an issue at least with my part.

Ah, so you're not using any kind of general templating or site building software? Just manually writing .html files? Don't we need something to ensure consistent layout, links, etc?

No, I didn't use any site building software, and yes, I created all html files with gedit (with the help of the powerful snippet plugin). CSS takes care of the consistent layout part.

Maybe not though. Ideally, most of the www content really could live on the wiki. We'd lose the mirrors, but I'm not really sure how much value there is in them anyway. Radical thought: with a front page we can better design, and pages we can lock down from editing, can www be completely wiki?

I'm not really sure how much benefit we get by making the site 100% wiki... (unless we create the Mailman Encyclopedia or something of that sort.) I see the benefit in the documentation and QandA part (because people can constantly improve and add contents to them), but other than that, wouldn't static HTML (plus links to those Wiki pages) do the job? Wikis are nice, but at the same time it seems to create otherwise unnecessary management issues (spamming, user accounts, etc).

What do you think?

• Satoshi

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:08:57PM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

[1] Admittedly the wiki is not running on free software. As much as I
like Confluence, this is an issue for a GNU project like Mailman.
However, again I don't think we yet have the resources to maintain our
own wiki, let alone import the existing content into a free wiki.

wiki.python.org could certainly host another wiki. About importing the existing content: is it possible to obtain a dump of all the existing wiki pages from Confluence, or would we need to crawl it?

--amk

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 09:01:38PM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

Confluence does support getting a dump of its pages in XML format,
which I've done. I'm leery of publishing the url widely though
because I haven't had a chance to look through it, so I don't know if
there is any sensitive information in there. Andrew, I'll send you
the url if you want to take a look.

I've looked through it and it's straightforward to pull out the text of wiki pages; the complicated task would be converting them from Confluence's wiki markup to MoinMoin. The dump does include a list of users, their e-mail addresses, and hashed versions of their passwords, so you shouldn't post it publicly.

Do you want me to actually start working on this conversion, or are you still deciding whether to use some alternative? It would be a good impetus to make me upgrade python.org to MoinMoin 1.6. (No rush here; it would probably be a few weeks before the upgrade can be completed because I can't work on it this week.)

--amk

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 10:34:30PM -0400, Barry Warsaw wrote:

Hi Andrew, thanks for taking a look at this. It's not a high priority
for me, but I know the FSF is interested in this.

Noted; I haven't been looking any further at the task, and don't expect to have time for this at all until after Memorial Day (the weekend of May 24-25).

One question though (for Terri). I know that she was thinking about
migrating the documentation to the wiki, and using the PDF export
feature of Confluence to provide hard copy. Is this something that we
can do with Moin?

Out-of-the-box Moin doesn't have such a feature, but there's at least one plug-in for it <http://moinmo.in/ActionMarket/CreatePdfDocument>, so it would be possible to set up PDF exports.

--amk

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On 25-Jun-08, at 3:44 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

Back in April,

Err, my bad, it was actually March. Clearly we're overdue for some
action on this. ;)

Terri

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On Jun 25, 2008, at 4:17 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

On 25-Jun-08, at 3:44 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

...

Back in April,

Err, my bad, it was actually March. Clearly we're overdue for some
action on this. ;)

Clearly, I still suck. :(

A couple of quick thoughts. I don't mind the beige, but what if the
color scheme were a little closer to the logo? That might be
unreadable though. If so, the gray looks nice.

I wonder if we should consider using this system to write the new site
in:

http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

It's Python (yay!) and avoids us having to write pure HTML (yay, yay!)
which I really hate. ;). I know Andrew is familiar with Sphinx
because it's what we use to build the python.org site. Ours would be
much simpler.

It took me a little bit of work to get Sphinx running on my Mac, but
it's not too bad. What do you think?

• -Barry

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On 8-Jul-08, at 11:53 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:

On Jun 25, 2008, at 4:17 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

...

On 25-Jun-08, at 3:44 PM, Terri Oda wrote:

...

Back in April, Err, my bad, it was actually March. Clearly we're overdue for
some action on this. ;) Clearly, I still suck. :(

I was cleaning up a mess some spammers made of a friend's server, and
my time's just opened up again now. So your timing is impeccable! ;)

A couple of quick thoughts. I don't mind the beige, but what if
the color scheme were a little closer to the logo? That might be
unreadable though. If so, the gray looks nice.

I'll experiment with some reds/pinks later this week and see if
anything works. One complaint about the gray is that the whole page
is very cool then and it could use some warmth, but even those who
commented on that didn't think that the beige was necessarily the
right *source* of warmth as a solution. One of the web designers who
took a peek did suggest using the gray but with the pink/reds of the
logo as link colours there, so I'll try that.

Do we have a higher res version of the logo anywhere? One of the
graphic designers who looked over the site pointed out that it's
looking a little jpeg-artifact abused, beyond the intentional
fuzzing. I can probably bribe a graphic designer with cookies to try
to get it cleaned up or remade, but it'd be exceptionally lovely if
we had one hanging around already.

Also, the menu's going to need to have an extra donate link now. :)

It took me a little bit of work to get Sphinx running on my Mac,
but it's not too bad. What do you think?

I'm not picky -- I could probably write the menu-generating script in
straight python if need be. In fact, it's simple enough that that
might not be a bad idea, now that I think about it.

Terri

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Terri Oda wrote: | | Do we have a higher res version of the logo anywhere? One of the | graphic designers who looked over the site pointed out that it's looking | a little jpeg-artifact abused, beyond the intentional fuzzing. I can | probably bribe a graphic designer with cookies to try to get it cleaned | up or remade, but it'd be exceptionally lovely if we had one hanging | around already.

Are you looking at the 247x93 one at <http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/otherstuff.html>? AFAIK that's as good as we have. I did find links to some gifs on The Dragon De Monsyne's web site <http://transform.to/~dragondm/>, but the links are broken.

Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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Terri Oda wrote:

The latest version is here:

http://terri.zone12.com/mm-website/

So, that's using some red/pink from the logo as link colours as someone suggested to me.

I really don't want anyone over-riding my own choices for link colors.

More suggestions welcome!

Did you want to mention the official Mailman group on LinkedIn? Of course, I can't figure out how to give you a link that will take you to their page for the group as opposed to the "home page" that I defined for the group (namely www.list.org), but that may be something we can resolve.

-- Brad Knowles <brad@python.org> Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists

Terri Oda wrote:

The original version I had used the standard link colours (ie - it didn't set them), and comments ranged from just general malaise about the colour scheme of the links to several people who asserted it was nearly unreadable on their setups.

That implies their client is misconfigured and that should be their problem and not ours. Right?

                                So I'll take the comment under 

advisement, but I suspect you're going to be in the minority.

I would urge caution about paying too much attention to a vocal minority, to the potential detriment of the majority who aren't complaining.

Now, if this was being driven by 508 compliance for accessibility and there simply were no other viable options, it would be more difficult for me to have grounds for a complaint. But so far I haven't heard terms like that.

Since I've since changed the original css, here's the current stuff with no link colours specified (so they default to your browser settings):

http://terri.zone12.com/mm-website/?css=mailman-nolink

IMO, that looks much better.

...

Did you want to mention the official Mailman group on LinkedIn? Of course, I can't figure out how to give you a link that will take you to their page for the group as opposed to the "home page" that I defined for the group (namely www.list.org), but that may be something we can resolve.

Seems like a good fit for the "Participate" page! I've put it just under the wiki entry.

Cool. Thanks!

-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>