[Chicago] Chipy.org site rework

[Joshua Herman]

If you want to help out with this follow the readme instructions to
setup the environment. I would fork the github repository first.
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http://www.google.com/profiles/zitterbewegung



On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 2:38 PM, Valentina Kibuyaga
<namusoke at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I would like to help in anyway possible; however, I am a novice at
> programming.
>
> Please instruct me in how I can be of assistance.
>
>
>  Thank you,
>
> Valentina Kibuyaga
> ________________________________
> Date: Fri, 18 May 2012 11:06:49 -0500
> From: emperorcezar at gmail.com
> To: chicago at python.org
> Subject: [Chicago] Chipy.org site rework
>
>
> Few days ago. I did work and brought the Chipy.org up to date with master on
> Github. The current site has some real issues, the design being the most
> minor of them.
>
> Code complication and organization
> ==========================
>
> Currently the code[1] itself is way over complicated for what the site is.
> Pinax is an _ok_ platform, but in it's old incarnation, it's way overkill.
> Take a look at the code. There is lots of cruft in there that's unused or
> just not useful such as tribes, swap, bookmarks, etc. Even with all this in
> there, there isn't things that could be useful, such as presenter
> information, a place to propose a talk, etc.
>
> The structure of the code has issues also. Settings aren't broken out
> correctly. The media directory lives in the code directory. The directory
> structure can go too many levels. There are no real db migrations. It uses
> django-piston (which can't be installed using pip). It goes on.
>
> System administration tasks
> =====================
>
> The system it is on has some major issues. The first of all being that there
> are many permissions issues and the machine is behind on updates. The db and
> media isn't backed up. There's no staging setup, no real way to deploy.
>
>
> What my plan is
> ============
>
> All the above resulted in the situation where changes are difficult to
> implement, and even more difficult to deploy in an easy or automated maner.
>
> There are two major things I'm planning to do with the site. The first is a
> clean state implementation. My plan is to start with the Symposium[2]
> project. Symposium is a new Pinax project for conference websites. It could
> be used to introduce some very useful features to the Chipy site such as
> talk proposals, easier meeting scheduling, etc.
>
> Symposium is used for the Pycon and Djangocon sites. It's not the easiest
> thing to setup, but it provides a good starting point and I'm glad Pinax has
> finally gone in the correct direction by making the project a github repo
> that you can fork and develop on top of. Which in my opinion is the only
> real way to go with something that complicated.
>
> The plan is to set that up, get some new templates in place, and port over
> code from the old site.
>
> I plan to use the git flow development method and github pull
> requests/issues for features and code review 90% of things. On the old site
> there was a lot of development going on in the backend that people weren't
> communicating. If you remember the email from Carl recently about json of
> the talks. I implemented that and found out only when I went in to deploy
> that someone had setup piston in the repo, but it was never deployed.
>
> The system itself. The Chipy site should not be a complicated piece of
> software. In the world of PaaS[3] there isn't really a reason that Chipy.org
> should be running on it's own VM/Slice. Chipy.org should be running on
> something like Heroku/Dotcloud/Gondor/Etc. to avoid the situation that we
> currently face on the system of it being out of date, permissions issues,
> etc. This would allow us to easily spin up staging instances. More
> importantly, it would remove the burden of admining a system that really
> shouldn't need admining.
>
>
> What can you do to help
> ==================
> People with Django experience, and especially anyone with design experience
> would be greatly appreciated.
>
> If you do want to help and don't have experience, you can submit a pull
> request and we can review it and make sure everything is in order. It would
> be a good chance for you to have your coding looked over and gather some
> great advice.
>
> I'm also looking for feature suggestions and requests. The best way to bring
> something up is as an issue or a pull request in the repo, which you can
> find at https://github.com/chicagopython/chipy.org
>
> I'm a huge fan of pull requests being feature requests, so if you have two
> lines of code ready to go, start a pull request and the discussion can
> start. For an idea of that workflow, take a look at
> http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-github
>
> Thanks!
>
> [1] https://github.com/brianray/Chipy
> [2] https://github.com/pinax/symposion
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
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