[Firebird-website] WEB presence overview

[Lester C. <le...@ls...>]

Having been involved with various aspects of Firebird on the web for some time 
now, I feel I do have a good grasp of some of the problems. Since MOST of my 
income is now generated via web based applications, a professional INTEGRATED 
presence of Firebird on the web would at least support that activity. The 
current missmash of web SITES does not create a good impression :(

The one thing I've been striving for personally is a SINGLE system that covers 
all of the web based requirements. The first aspect of that is the simple 
distinction between control, content and style.

HOW a site looks is important, and changes to that style from time to time 
does make sense. I get the impression that the current discussion *IS* only 
about the style of the site? Which misses some other fundamental points. What 
about all the other requirements?

I don't know how many different sites I'm currently linking to for parts of 
the Firebird 'experience' but all are different, and have different styles.

We are here on the SF list, and being told to use the tracker for tracking 
this debate, we have yahoo groups, sf presence for cvs and distribution, third 
party newsgroups, various blogs - oh and a wiki ;) There is a range of 
applications providing the presence, but with little interaction between the 
content and often conflicting opinions on where a discussion should take place.

I still don't have an over night fix to offer. I've been banging my head 
against a brick wall over the wiki for a long time, but 'other opinions' 
prevail on the directions SECTIONS of the project are taken and this is 
fragmenting things. My own target, and one which a number of my customers are 
now subscribing to directly, is for a 'framework' that provides the base for 
an integrated web presence. With Firebird at the core of the package.

A single logon for accessing everything.
eMail OR web viewed lists/forum/discussion.
Topics which can be tided to a particular content item.
Online access to control all aspects of the site ( admin, moderate, edit ...)
Content that internally can be XML so the 'documentation' project - online
News list online or distributed
Blogs
Tracker
On-line CVS browsing
RSS feeds
USER selectable style - visually impaired can actually view the content!

... no mention of 'wiki' because every element of the above uses the same 
editor to handle input of content. An XML editor would be nice to add at some 
point! But a number of on-line editors can currently be selected.

And of cause it MUST all run on Firebird :)

None of the existing frameworks provide a total solution, and *I* would be 
happy if the existing tracker could be expanded - if it used Firebird. But 
MANY of the web based projects roll themselves into a little hole and ignore 
the big picture. I've been working with bitweaver for 4 years now and it IS 
providing a large section of the above list AS WELL as side areas such as 
commerce and other application specific tools. tikiwiki from which it was 
originally ported is finally discussing an internal restructure that currently 
looks as if it will mirror EXACTLY that undertaken to create 
tikipro->bitweaver in the first place, and also options for an XML editor.

So to do my usual job of messing up things, can we discuss WHAT we want to 
achieve before arguing over how it should look?
ONCE AGAIN I reiterate that I am more than prepared to provide a server and 
bandwidth for testing, but http://wiki.firebirdsql.org/ simply needs bringing 
up to date and some of the other modules switched on ....

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
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