[Pydotorg-redesign] Graphic redesign

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

Walter Dörwald writes:
 > Converting this look to HTML isn't difficult, as long as we can use
 > CSS. (But of course the web site must be usable with Netscape 4,
 > it just doesn't have to look identical IMHO).
 > 
 > I'll try to do an HTML version over the weekend.

Cool!

 > I don't know which tool is currently used for generating the pages,
 > and whether we would be willing to switch tools, if that would simplify
 > generating masses of pages and being able quickly change the look
 > for all pages.

We use a little hack called "HT2HTML", which exists primarily to
support python.org.  (That's certainly why it was created.)

As long as "the look" is something like lots of boilerplate and
navigation surrounding a one or two bits of content (the "body" and
"continuation" sections), it shouldn't be hard to support the new
look.  A new generator class would be needed, but that's it, and isn't
all that difficult.

Information on HT2HTML can be found at:

    http://ht2html.sourceforge.net/

In particular, you probably want to look at this page:

    http://ht2html.sourceforge.net/components.html

The HTML in the "content" areas is hand-written, and the navigation
material is generated from additional information stored in various
places using HT2HTML.

Aahz writes:
 > We're willing to switch in theory.  In practice, unless we can amass a
 > group of volunteers for a formatting sprint, there are too many pages to
 > convert without a compelling reason.  There's also the issue that we

I think it should be easy enough to write a script to categorize all
the HTML pages on python.org into "generated" and "non-generated"
categories, and run ht2html for the generated ones (just run
"make; make install" for each affected directory) to handle the
generated pages, and provide a list of HTML that needs to be checked
manually.

 > need to do a lot of content cleanup in addition to the graphic redesign.

I think this is a completely separate issue, and can be done
independently.  Cleanup can happen at any time.

 > We've been sort-of assuming that we'll switch to Zope3 once that gets
 > released.

Oh.  I didn't know that.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation