Re: [pgsql-advocacy] PostgreSQL.org Design Proposal

I'm one of the people that enthusiastically offered to help, and have
since jumped to 'lurker' status.

There's a couple of reasons for this, and I know enough people to be
confident that this is a common theme. Most folks willing to help out
here are of a technical nature, and when these people find out the new
site is a homegrown effort they lose interest immediately. Why in the
world would someone want to build their own when there are hundreds,
HUNDREDS of portal tooklits and CMS to choose from? To an experienced
developer this is like slowly removing your fingernails with a dull
razor that was just dipped in fresh lemon juice.

Second, it seems there are a couple people that insist that everything
is going fine, and that (more or less) everything must be done their
way(TM). There are other people that are convinced that nothing is
getting done, and appear so desperate that they will take anything
that they can get. The disparity to me (a relative outsider)
indicates that whatever effort I put into this is at risk of either
being duplicated or dropped altogether before ever seeing daylight.

I joined the Mambo CMS team beause I realized it was an
interesting-but-pointless exercise creating my own CMS, but mainly to
also wire in support for Postgres ;-) Drupal, and others could also
fit the bill. I just can't see that the website for a database is so
special that it requires a ground-up approach of cobbled-together
libraries and proprietary code.

Third, the 'web presence' of the Postgres community as a whole is a
mess. Gborg, pgfoundry, www, advocacy, how many other sites are
there? And in what state? Sheesh, this is as bad as python. (slaps
forehead)

My experience with Mambo is that you can really only have one
'official website' (and tightly link that to the forums), and only one
'dev site' (which for us is mamboforge.net). Then there is no
confusion, no duplication of effort, and a stronger web identity for
Postgres.

We just had someone submit a graphical layout proposal for the new
site (which I considered brilliant), hoping to help. They were
immediately told 'thanks, but no thanks'. ? Then all the
compliments started coming in, and I saw many people agree that this
was a great design - clean, professional, aesthetic. But there were a
couple people that said it won't work - and also explained the rather
non-standard requirements that they have, and why they didn't like it.
It just doesn't make sense to me.

I would love to help out, but after a couple weeks of reading the
threads I'm not sure how to help, or if it is really welcome. Who is
in charge, what is the plan, and how can I (realistically) help?

-- Mitch

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:52:53 +0100, Dave Page <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: pgsql-www-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> > [mailto:pgsql-www-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Robby Russell
> > Sent: 28 October 2004 02:20
> > To: Greg Sabino Mullane
> > Cc: pgsql-www(at)postgresql(dot)org; pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
> > Subject: Re: [pgsql-advocacy] [pgsql-www] PostgreSQL.org
> > Design Proposal
> >
> >
> > So, what is the real issue? Organization? Prehistoric code
> > that isn't fun to maintain? Lack of people?
>
> People. Lots of people volunteer to help and then do nothing. Few, such
> as Alexey, do put in a lot of effort. The other 'main' people in the
> group are Marc, Robert, Devrim and myself, all of whom do what we can
> but have fingers in a lot of other aspects of the project as well at the
> moment - for instance, Devrim is working on translations and RPMs for
> the core server and projects like pgAdmin, Robert works on phpPgAdmin,
> the weekly news and the foundation, and I work on pgAdmin, psqlODBC, and
> the Win32 installer.
>
> If you can rustle up volunteers to work on the content, and minimal
> amount of coding to integrate it into the site that would certainly
> speed things up.
>
> The 'howto' can be found at
> http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgweb/cvs/co.php/portal/README
>
> The 'todo' can be found at http://wwwdevel.postgresql.org/todo
>
>
>
> Regards, Dave
>
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