GNOME Webhackers

About the Webhackers

The GNOME Webhackers are in the process of rebuilding the various GNOME Web sites. They are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the official GNOME site et al.

Process

All discussions take place on the mailing list, and on IRC in the #webhackers channel. Real decisions should be proposed and discussed on the mailing list.

CVS write access is pretty rare at this point. Please send patches to the mailing list and write access will be sponsored when this becomes a burden or just inefficient.

Read the introduction to the Webhackers process to learn the modules that make up the GNOME Web sites. This document also describes how to setup your development environment, check your changes, and submit patches. There is also a few notes about the tools used to make and check changes.

Todo

Check out the todo list, which is an exhaustive list of what we're thinking about right now. Please post to the list if you have additions or ideas. In addition, visit Bugzilla and check the bugs filed there.

Defects: missing documentation, broken links, invalid markup, broken layout
Refactorings: encode content as UTF-8, migrate to XHTML, update d.g.o make to use XHTML, update *g.o to use XSLT page generation
Enhancements: add subdomains to bugzilla, add status to documents, library.gnome.org, gnome software, search

Planning

GNOME Webhackers is reorganizing the site to simplify management.

Permanent content, documents that have historical value, will be moved to library.gnome.org. Over the course of time, the status of documents will change from current, to deprecated, to obsolete, but they will not be deleted. The links to library content are guaranteed to remain for the life of the library. The library will only grow.

The content on www, developer, and foundation, etc..., will be semi-permanent. Content will be revised to remain current. These sites will point to content in the library, reducing the need to grow, shrink, or change the site structure of the main sites. When content is removed, a redirect will probably be used (traffic reporting would be nice to help make the decision).

Dynamic content and applications are being replaced with plain pages where possible to address security and integration considerations. Features like the Software Map and search must be made from generated content or moving the service to a hardened server.

For the reasons mentioned above, we need to review and revise our working documents.

Use Cases & Personas: We want to review and consolidate all the use cases we have used to identify the content and services the GNOME Web site must perform. We want to build an authoritative list of use cases to check that the GNOME site is always relevant. We will consider using personas to model how users will access the Web site to ensure the site really works for our users. Simply put, we want to update our set of requirements to have a concrete definition of what must be done.
Information Architecture: We want to review our IA in light of the reorganization. For the most part, all that we will do is consolidate and amend our existing ideas in a single document.
Design: We want to cull the current design from the existing documents. We will review it for additions to incorporate our changes to the IA and infrastructure.
Infrastructure & Implementation: Consolidate and update the existing documents to match the current operating environment. We will develop a plan to satisfy unmet use cases and personas.