Xubuntu Website Software (was: Re: UDS Karmic Goals)

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Jim Campbell wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Pasi Lallinaho <open at knome.fi
> <mailto:open at knome.fi>> wrote:
>
>     Cody A.W. Somerville wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     > On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Pasi Lallinaho <open at knome.fi
>     <mailto:open at knome.fi>
>     > <mailto:open at knome.fi <mailto:open at knome.fi>>> wrote:
>     >
>
>     There is no need to start a flamewar about the subject. Again I feel
>     that this is one of the situations where I think having experts from
>     different areas matter - the experts in web should be listened
>     more when
>     we are talking about things concerning web.
>
>
> FWIW, the Ubuntu server team just has a team blog up at
> ubuntuserver.wordpress.com <http://ubuntuserver.wordpress.com>. Not
> very fancy!  The launchpad team has a blog up at blog.launchpad.net
> <http://blog.launchpad.net>.  The Kubuntu team does not have a team blog.
>
> I do like the idea of having a team blog, though. A team blog is
> different than a planet in that the team blog belongs to the project,
> and the authorship does not belong to one person.  Also, the content
> seems more polished than one might find on a regular developer blog. 
> (No offense to regular developer blogs . . . ).  I'm comfortable with
> individual developer blogs just being on planet.ubuntu.com
> <http://planet.ubuntu.com>, but if others feel otherwise - that's ok, too.
My point in "Planet Xubuntu" was to gather all the Xubuntu posts in one
place, like Planet Ubuntu does for everything *buntu*. Xubuntu is a way
smaller subject and I doubt that the PX would have a different audience
than PU. I know it sounds like doubling things, but this is what I
perceive. We also could aggregate something that is not aggregated into
PU and point to related sites.

If we decide to set up a team blog which has no aggregated posts from
the authors own blogs, we are growing our workload quite a lot. We have
been very lazy in updating our website, the wiki etc. etc., but most of
us have written our personal blogs quite conscientious. Gathering a
Xubuntu Planet would in this light make some sense. The content would be
quite easily updated, even if the post quality and appropriateness would
not be as great as it would be with blog with no aggregated posts.
>
> With regards to our current site are the RSS Feeds for Xubuntu.org
> broken?  Is Drupal limited in how well it can configure RSS feeds, or
> are we just not using it right?  Pasi, it sounds like you are
> suggesting that we move Xubuntu.org to Worpress MU, correct?
If you are in any other page than home page, the RSS link in the left is
not working. It seems like a bug in the HTML creating code, not sure if
it is my fault.

Yes, I suggest and stand for WPMU.
>
> All things being equal, I would like to stay with Drupal to stay
> consistent with the other Ubuntu flavors, if possible.  If an upgrade
> to Drupal, or adding in additional modules, would give us more
> features (or fix existing features), I think we should look at that
> before considering moving everything over to Wordpress.
I don't know how much consistency really matters in this situation.
There is no place where the sites should be working together or
exchanging content. And Xubuntu is a community-driven project after all.
I'm not really fond of Drupal personally, and that of course guides my
opinions about it in a community also. I think we can get to the same
outcome with both Drupal and WP(MU), though.

Migrating to WP (or any CMS/whatever) would not be really hard, because
we have that little content. I've just migrated my personal blogs worth
of ~150 articles, ~100 comments and lots of other things to WP, and it
wasn't that exhaustive, even if I had to do most of it manually.
>
> A bit offtopic, but I think the Oxford Archaeology blog is a good
> example of a "team blog done well."  In fact, generally speaking the
> other team blogs (Q.A., Launchpad, Server Team) are done pretty well,
> too . . . It's just that the O.A. blog stands out to me as one that is
> particularly well-done. For example, it has content you don't find
> elsewhere, the posts are well-organized, it includes grahics where
> relevant, and they break-up sections of text with different headings
> to make it easier to read.  That would be the kind of professionalism
> that I would expect from Xubuntu team blog entries.
For what it comes to "doing a blog well", I think WP is far superior to
Drupal in this matter. It is really easy to template to work as a blog
and to show different kind of content lists, page layouts and whatever.
>
> Jim 
A note I would like to make that it is *totally* overkill to have Drupal
for the website *AND* WordPress for the blog(s). As I've said earlier,
we can achieve the same results in both. I'd still suggest going for
WPMU due to its superior features and templating blogs.

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho
Xubuntu Marketing Lead
Web-designer, graphic artist
IRC: knome @ freenode