[xmlroff] Re: xmlroff website help wanted

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Another reprise of an answer that disappeared into the wrong bit
bucket.  Unfortunately, my answered tend to get shorter when I have to
write them out for a second time.

Stefan has offered to help update the xmlroff website.

Stefan Seefeld <se...@sy...> wrote at Sat, 21 Aug 2004 19:00:24 -0400:
> Tony Graham wrote:
> > Stefan,
> > 
> > Your offer of help is gratefully accepted.
> > 
> > It's a pity that you're not on the xmlroff mailing list (which is
> > *very* low volume usually) since just yesterday I announced a push to
> > get more people signed up as xmlroff developers.  Contributing to the
> > xmlroff website would certainly count.
> 
> ok, ok, I'm on the list now :-)

Great.  There is a digest option, too.

> > No, I don't really have a TODO list.  Here's what I can think of off
> > the top of my head:
> > 
> >  - The project needs its own copy of the Docbook website DTD and
> >    stylesheets.
> > 
> >    Right now I have an old, private, slightly hacked copy of the
> >    Docbook stylesheets.  There should be a copy in the CVS repository
> >    so anyone can rebuild the website and get consistent results.
> 
> hmm, what I usually do when using docbook xsl is write my own wrapper
> scripts that include the original ones with the 'canonical' URL at
> sf.net. If you happen to have the stylesheets installed on your machine
> your xml catalog usually has an entry for it, so xsltproc doesn't
> need to download anything. If you don't it still works, though it
> takes some more time.

One of my hacks is to map a "role" attribute on <entry> to a "class"
attribute on <td>, and I had to modify the table stylesheet to get it
to work.  A simple override in my custom-website.xsl just made all but
the first entry in each row disappear.

> >  - There are too many entries in the top-level sidebar menu.
> 
> Indeed, though with some regrouping this could get much better
> ('visitor', 'user', 'developer' seems to me to be a fairly good
>   toplevel grouping).
> 
> >  - The 'News' should be the RSS news feed from the SourceForge site so
> >    I/we don't have to update two places whenever there's a new version
> >    of xmlroff.
> 
> exactly. sf.net provides rss feeds for a number of tools such as news
> and releases. Luckily for us, docbook website now supports rss (I was
> told the other day that it's not yet part of any release, so we'd have
> to use a docbook version from cvs).
> 
> >  - There was a suggestion at one point to replace the website with
> >    just the Wiki, but I see maintaining the conformance and
> >    implementation sequence pages as Wiki pages being more pain and
> >    suffering than it's worth.
> 
> yeah. A wiki is fine if you have lots of unstructured activity (i.e.
> users wanting to comment, etc.).

There is a Wiki that doesn't get much use.

> > What suggestions do you have?
> 
> Well, the first thing to do would be to simply rearrange the toc
> (i.e. the menu). The first day I looked at the site I wondered how
> to access the mailing list...
> 
> The second step would be to integrate said rss feeds and thus get
> rid of the redundant data.
> 
> Finally, someone with graphics/design experience and good taste
> could have a close look at some styling (css...) for the site.

Gee, thanks for the compliment.

> A totally different issue is what tools to use for the project
> management. If you are happy with the tools sf.net provides we
> should try to integrate them as well as possible into the site.
> 
> I used to manage my projects (fresco, synopsis) at sf.net, until
> I was sufficiently annoyed by the buggy tools that I moved elsewhere.
> Now I'm using subversion instead of cvs, and the roundup issue tracker
> instead of sf.net's own bug/task tracker.
> 
> Regards,
> 		Stefan
> 
> PS: feel free to drag this back to the ML as I'm subscribed now.

Done.

Regards,


Tony.