[Chicago] Chipy.org site rework

[Carl Karsten]

Except the readme comes from symposium, and it is broken.

submitting a patch now... stand by.

On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Joshua Herman <zitterbewegung at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you want to help out with this follow the readme instructions to
> setup the environment. I would fork the github repository first.
> ---Profile:---
> 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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-- 
Carl K