[Firebird-website] Some ideas

[<pc...@at...>]

Hi all (currently 12 members)!

It seems that all IBDI & Firebird members who are interested in 
Firebird web site are here, so we can start the show :)

Here you are some facts and basic ideas about the Firebird web 
site:

1) Our web site should be a comprehensive source of persistent or 
semi-persistent information's about all corners and aspects of 
Firebird project. 

2) The viewing audience will vary at great scale (curious visitors, 
plain users, developers who develop with FB and FB developers). 
It's clear that each audience would need different informations (or at 
least with different level of completeness and complexity).

3) Each audience should easy find its way to their area of interest. 
Thus idea of portal-like site with levelled down sections obviously 
come to mind. We can also split it to more independent sites (at 
least to two for newcomers and users&developers as was proposed 
by Markus). I prefer the first solution, despite that a lot of work 
would be needed to twist phpNuke. Well, if we'll grow to the scale 
of KDE project, we should split it to sub-domain sites, but I think 
that (1) we're not there (2) when time will come, we would move to 
different host.

4) Site maintenance has two areas: site design&development and 
content management. I think that they can (and should) be easily 
separated to different people (or groups). I also agree with Markus 
that site maintenance should be a distributed task. I would be 
pleased, if content creation and edition would be easy, would not 
require special tools or knowledge and could be managed by 
anyone from anywhere. Of course, that would require some kind of 
content management system, but once this system would be 
created, the actual amount of work needed for site maintenance 
would be greatly decreased (not mention the lower entry barrier for 
web content providers). Hence I'd like suggest the creation of two 
working groups inside web team: CMS development&maintenance 
group and editorial group.

5) Automation gimmicks and other features of dynamic site should 
be also considered. I think that we could utilize at least some, like 
polls, automatically generated statistics etc. We already have 
some at SourceForge and it would be nice if we would be able to 
integrate them into our site.

Well, I think that it's enough for start, as I don't like burden you with 
too many ideas at once. I'd like also start with basic concepts and 
then roll down with details.

Best regards
-- Pavel

Firebird - The most addictive database
http://firebird.sourceforge.net