[SciPy-dev] Some Feedback

[Robert Kern]

Travis Oliphant wrote:

> The scipy website is a problem.  Currently it's a Plone site that is 
> theoretically supposed to be modifiable by the community.   There are 
> two problems with it:
> 
> 1) Most people have not absorbed the Zen of Plone yet, and so 
> modifications to the site don't happen as they could/should.
> 
> 2) Editing the site becomes painfully slow as Plone starts to use up 
> lots of memory.
> 
> Result:  scipy site is more static then it should be.
> 
> Any help in the web-site area would be very useful.

I think there's a reasonable amount of consensus that we should have a
Trac instance for scipy. Personally, I would go a bit farther to suggest
that the Trac instance should be the public face of the project. That
is, http://www.scipy.org/ should give the Trac Welcome page for the
project. We've never really used Plone's CMS capabilities to their full
extent. Most of the content on the site is perfectly suitable for going
into a Wiki.

I can see two major roadblocks to switching to Trac at this time:

1) By default, Trac doesn't give a way for individuals to register an
account for themselves. Consequently, an administrator either has to
manually add people so they can edit the Wiki, or we allow Wiki editing
without any kind of login (== Wikispam). There's a plugin to add
self-registration, but it has to be installed and tested, which leads me to:

2) Joe Cooper's schedule. He's a busy man, and even transferring some of
the admin's duties to someone else is going to take some time.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
 Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
  -- Richard Harter