[SWLUG] new website - status update

[Vladimir Zlatanov]

I've written a status update and posted it on the website
(http://beta.swlug.org), and after some soul searching and arguing with
my inner spammer decided to repost it to the mailing list.

>>

Ok, after some silence it is time to describe the status of what's being
done on the website. First things first. The installed functionality:

      * blogs
      * pages
      * wiki (kind of, sort of)
      * forums
      * mailing list-forum bridge
      * feed aggregation (planet)
      * custom swlug theme with a rather confused looking winged
        penguin, probably wondering what are these dragon wings doing
        there, or why is it looking like a bat (but aren't bats cousins
        of dragons? at least in some mythologies) antway the original
        dragon-penguin is a Creative Commons image, which I slightly
        modified. Attribution will follow shortly.
      * polls

Some explanation is probably required. Every website member has a blog.
Every post can be tagged with keywords. The markup for posts can be
selected between the default markdown or limited html.

Pages are general purpose web-pages, which are not blogs or polls. The
distinction between blog posts and pages is nearly superficial, blogs
are personal, and for each blog there is a separate blog list.

The wiki functionality is enabled across the website. In fact one can
look at the website as a big wiki with blogs, polls and forums, which
are just some special content structures or types. If you link to a non
existent page with the wiki prefix, like beta.swlug.org/wiki/blah and
you follow the link, you will be redirected to a create page stub - to
create a page with a title blah of one of the configured page types. In
order to keep things simple, no extra wiki-tools were installed,
although it is possible to add "talk" pages (just fancy comments),
diffs, etc...

No WYSIWYG editor was installed. Again, in the name of simplicity.
Markdown is simple and widely used on the net, but if really required
there is a choice of different editors, big enough to feed a moderate
flame war.

The forum is the default drupal forum. It organises posts in forum
topics (special pages) and replies go into comments. The bridge with the
mailing list follows that design. Currently, while in testing, the
bridge is not configured to follow the mailing list or submit to it,
since we don't want to pollute the it with test messages. Messages
coming from the mailing list originating from currently unknown email
addresses create a new user account on the website. We still need to
configure the mail policies on the system to filter unwanted emails to
the bridge email account.

The theme is a custom thing designed for swlug. It does require some
polish. Eventually I'll upload it to drupal.org under GPL. If the final
setup is ok, it might be a good idea to create a LUG installation
profile and upload it to the mothership as well.


TODO
No special coding is required, unless someone is willing to create an
IRC logs filter, so that conversations can be pasted and automatically
beautified.

The theme requires more work. There are a few visual inconsistencies,
some of the admin and edit pages require more work. Over the weekend,
I'll make the theme code public and do a separate write up describing
the theme. Help would be appreciated.

Migrating content from the existing swlug website. There isn't that
much, but still it will be better if we automate that. Database magic
with squirts of php will be required.

Evaluate and configure automatic url aliasing. At the moment the
defaults are used. Better ones might be required.

Ideas needed. Up until now all was about some basic functionality. What
else is required?