[SciPy-dev] the public face of scipy.org (was Some Feedback)

[Fernando Perez]

Andrew Straw wrote:

> 2b) I believe it's likely that installing Moin will take less time than
> figuring out the svn/login issue with Trac. (If we used Moin for the
> public face, we wouldn't need non-svn-commiters editing the Trac wiki,
> do we? Anonymous non-logged-in users can still create new tickets, I think.)

Correct on both.  It is trivial (I did it yesterday) to close the Trac wiki to 
anonymous edits and yet admit anonymous ticket submissions.  In fact, changing 
Trac permissions is pretty straightforward, except for the issue that we don't 
know how to decouple, in the virtualmin setup, the svn user list from the Trac 
one.

> 3) It would be really nice to be able to include images in wiki content,
> for tutorials, for example. Does Trac let you do that, including
> uploading the image? (I haven't seen any on any Trac sites I've seen.
> The docs http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/scipy_core/wiki/WikiFormatting
> suggest that the image must already be published somewhere on the web.)
> With Moin, it's "inline:MyFigureName.png", which then allows you to
> upload the image as an attachment to the page.

To inline images uploaded as attachments, you need the Image macro, available 
here:
http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/wiki/MacroBazaar

I installed two of these macros (not the image one) yesterday, and they're 
very easy to set up.

> 4) I don't see the benefits of having "Ticket:1432" on the public face
> of scipy.org.  With the public face of scipy.org, I think we're aiming
> to promote the-universe-of-scientific-python (and not
> scipy-the-package). I don't think we want to scare people off who are
> comparison shopping against our proprietary competitors by listing open
> tickets on the front page. Obviously I'm not saying we would use
> "Ticket:1432" on the front page if we used Trac, it's just that I don't
> see this feature as an advantage in the context of the front page.

The special Trac links are handy, but as Mark mentioned yesterday, they can 
apparently be replicated in Moin easily.  If you are going to hack on a 
Trac-friendly moin setup, it would be nice to use the approach Mark mentioned 
to provide transparent support for the basic Trac wiki links, as explained in 
section 'Trac Links' of (this is the standard Trac document, nothing 
IPython-specific):

http://projects.scipy.org/ipython/ipython/wiki/WikiFormatting


> 5) In the pretty-front-page-to-compete-with-proprietary-software
> department: Moin has lots of themes, some of which look pretty nice
> already, and modifying them to making new ones is easy. See
> http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ThemeMarket . I haven't seen any Trac
> instances look different than the default, and it looks pretty
> intimidating for the casual browser. ("Roadmap","Browse Source", "View
> Tickets" are all things I'd venture we don't want on our public face.)

Well, trac does have a templates/ directory for CSS:


ipython at scipy[templates]$ d
/home/ipython/trac/ipython/templates
total 40
-rw-rw-r--  1 ipython   75 Aug 10 00:27 README
-rw-rw-r--  1 ipython  197 Nov 12 22:25 site_css.cs
-rw-rw-r--  1 ipython  155 Aug 10 00:27 site_footer.cs
-rw-rw-r--  1 ipython  145 Aug 10 00:27 site_header.cs
-rw-rw-r--  1 ipython 1406 Nov  1 05:45 tracnav.css
ipython at scipy[templates]$ cat site_css.cs
<?cs
##################################################################
# Site CSS - Place custom CSS, including overriding styles here.
?>

@import url(<?cs var:chrome.href ?>/site/tracnav.css);


But I haven't found (and I looked yesterday for a while) sites with 
ready-to-roll 'themes' for Trac.  The top and bottom logos and are trivial to 
change from the trac.ini file, but more serious visual configurability doesn't 
appear to be Trac's strength.  The docs don't even mention the word 'themes' 
nor anything similar, as far as I can see.

> I hereby volunteer myself to set up Moin for the public face scipy.org,
> although whether it's possible to give me login permissions to do so is
> another question... I'm also happy to help someone (Joe Cooper?) do the
> same.

Great!  As I said, I was willing to try any of these solutions on the ipython 
site as well, so if you need a sandbox to play on with the virtualmin system 
(once install details are sorted out with Joe), let me know and I'll give you 
the necessary access.  I intend to use whatever solution we settle on 
(Trac/Moin/...) for the ipython site as well, so I'm doubly interested on 
seeing this resolved.  Since I haven't been too successful with the login 
issue with Trac, I'm all for Plan B, esp. if it comes with capable builtin 
working hands ;)

Cheers,

f