New website! ... not yet, really (Fwd: [28303] trunk/www)

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Good evening everyone!

	I am most glad to announce that thanks to the work I've been putting  
into the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script lately, I was able to recover our  
old web site back from the dead as a natural progression to the  
former, as you may have seen from my recent commit r28303. The result  
is posted at my web server, http://apollo.homeunix.net/macports,  
reflecting the state of the current trunk/www dir in svn at any moment.

	Nevertheless, what you'll see there is no more than the bringing up  
to speed of the old content with current information, but it is  
otherwise the same site we used to have back in OpenDarwin days (the  
"not yet" part of this message's title, unfortunately). While at it I  
also restructured the sources a bit, moving files here and there to  
have a cleaner layout, only editing the English pages and moving all  
other languages into a 'localized' dir, though.

	The really important part, however, is the revival of the ports.php  
page, which many users have been craving for ever since we moved to  
Mac OS Forge. I'm feeding this page with live information off our  
ports tree by running the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script locally, though  
not automated yet (so lag is to be expected).

	Surely many things will seem broken (links maybe --surely for any  
language other than English--) and/or outdated, certainly including  
the now aging visual & structural design. Kevin Van Vechten assured  
me we could host the ports.php page and new guide on Mac OS Forge  
servers, but I'm more than sure that only from looking at the site  
it'll be quite obvious that we need a new and revamped design, short  
of a complete overhaul.

	In a nutshell, the purpose of this message is to call for a  
discussion on what we should do with our web site, which is in  
desperate need of some love, blood and new air. I'm even thinking  
about calling for an open contest so that anyone can submit new  
designs and logos for the project to adapt, extending the invitation  
to our entire user base: users mailing list, irc channel, wordpress  
post, wiki page, maybe even inviting WebKit people --who naturally  
have a thing for designing beautiful websites-- and who knows what  
else... something akin to NetBSD's logo redesign contest some years  
ago. Even though the rules for such contest would have to be very  
clearly defined and the entire process might be somewhat involved, I  
have to admit I'm developing quite a strong inclination for this  
approach; if anything, it'll surely help spice up interest and  
involvement with the project from our user base.

	So to sum up, it would be great to define a roadmap for a revamped  
web presence before devoting any more energy to what we currently  
have. Please don't be shy to post your opinions so that we can all  
start working toward finding the resources we need to make this  
happen. I am more than happy to lead this effort both in planning and  
coordination, but one mandatory requirement before moving forward is  
knowing if I'll have anything to lead ;-)

	Regards,...


-jmpp