[pydotorg-www] project plan

[Michael Foord]

On 21/04/2010 20:56, R. David Murray wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:31:00 -0400, Richard Leland<rich at richleland.com>  wrote:
>    
>> I agree with Michael - as someone that is getting familiar with the process
>> it just doesn't seem as agile as it could be. For instance, if there was a
>> decision to add 5 new sections with 30 pages of content, which method would
>> be faster for updating - a through-the-web-based approach or the existing
>> create files, check in, build? I'm not sure one is faster than the other and
>> I'm sure there would be varying opinions on that. Maybe the way to approach
>> this question is thinking about who could be editing the content. Should it
>> always be technical individuals or should someone with writing skills be
>> able to update the site as well?
>>      
> I'm not a current contributor to the python.org content, but I agree
> with everything Skip said about this.  For people who are (python)
> programmers, through-the-web editing is not agile.  ReST pretty much
> *is* text.  The tools are not hard to learn...and perhaps demystifying
> them for those who are scared of them would bring more developers into
> the software community, which would be a great thing.  "Writers" can be
> programmers too, some of them just don't know it :)
>    
Right - but it makes the *minimum* barrier for entry to contribute 
changes doing a full svn checkout, making changes in rest format (which 
I'm not proposing we drop as it goes) and then generating a patch (which 
then goes where?).

For a non-programming copy editor (for example) who wants to help this 
is a *huge* burden involving the command line and a whole bunch of 
tools. Absolutely no need for it to be this arcane. Just because they 
are tools that *we* as programmers are familiar with (and not all 
programmers are by any stretch of the imagination) is no reason to make 
it so complex.

There is also no conceptual reason that we couldn't come up with a 
system that allows both ways of working (a through the web system that 
generates patches for example) - but insisting we stick with the current 
system because we are familiar with it and have no reason to change is 
not good.

Michael


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> R. David Murray                                      www.bitdance.com
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