[brlcad-news] New BRL-CAD Website

[Christopher S. M. <br...@ma...>]

After nearly a year of effort, it's quite a pleasure to announce that  
the new BRL-CAD website is now on-line and ready for use.  The site  
is set up to help manage BRL-CAD documentation, FAQs, tutorials,  
geometry models, renderings, screenshots, data, and all of the other  
resources we have.  The site should also make managing that data much  
easier than was possible before.  The new website is available at:

http://brlcad.org

Ever since BRL-CAD became an open source project, we've had a strong  
need for a better web presence and improved website functionality.   
Since the migration to brlcad.org, though, the website has only  
received the absolute minimal effort required until an infrastructure  
was in place that could be more readily maintained.  Answering a call  
put forth in the open source community for web development help,  
Robert Leverington stepped forward and has been putting considerable  
effort in getting a new infrastructure in place.

The new BRL-CAD website provides a fully programmable and  
customizable content management system that should be able to expand  
with the needs of the project. There is an integrated wiki for  
community-contributed documentation and tutorials as well as an image  
gallery for showcasing the various ways BRL-CAD is put to use.   
Hopefully this site is the start of a new platform upon which the BRL- 
CAD community can discuss, collaborate, publish, and coordinate much  
more effectively.

A note about the appearance -- the look and feel of the site is not  
set in stone and will continue to evolve.  There are several  
remaining compatibility issues be resolved and updates will continue  
to be made over the upcoming months as data continues to be  
imported.  Right now, the importance is on content more than appearance.

I'd like to extend special thanks and appreciation to Robert  
Leverington for all of his hard work putting the site configuration  
together.  He put in exceptional attention to detail with many  
tedious months of effort making sure the site works the same across a  
dozen different browser configurations and making sure it has all the  
features we'll need. His patience and understanding as time  
frustratingly passed by month after month while trying to get "one  
more thing" working right has been outright admirable and appreciated.

We are now in the process of populating the site with data. Please  
feel free to make suggestions but even better, please jump in and  
have at it!  The new wiki (  http://brlcad.org/wiki ) in particular  
is ready and waiting for you to populate it with content.  Expect  
more announcements and changes over the upcoming weeks as more  
improvements are made.

Cheers!
Sean