[SWLUG] swlug site

[Mark Einon]

On 23 October 2013 10:37, Justin Mitchell <justin at discordia.org.uk> wrote:
>
> It is an all or nothing deal, I have tried repeatedly to provide
> facilities for someone to improve the site but all i seem to get are
> unhelpful suggestions of how they think it should be done.
>
> If the active members want it to be done by someone else then they can
> have the domains before i have to pay to renew them (4th dec, 9th jan)
> and i will wash my hands of it.
>
> But so far no-one has made any credible offer to take over, so I have
> taken the one helpful suggested new design, mashed it into a pmwiki skin
> to make it maintainable, and are preparing to switch over to it and just
> leave it at that.

Justin,

You've done a good job of providing the facilities that SWLUG are
using, but there are some issues with the current website and
self-maintained LAMP infrastructure that we can avoid in future -
namely that someone has to be an active maintainer, including handling
security patches and also removing the resultant spam that the website
is still currently plagued with. Some content has been updated
regularly but the plethora of date stamps on the frontpage makes
things look dated, and it has been shown there's far too much
interactive content for us to handle (e.g. the 'Member blogs' link is
full of spam that's not been cleared in over a year).

So why use another self-maintained security-bug prone CMS (bugs will
appear if it's not patched) and 'just leave it at that' (giving a high
probability that it will get compromised), when we can get this sort
of infrastructure for free and maintained by someone else? Several
suggestions (far from unhelpful, I might add) have been put forward
for this - including github for the webpages, which I used, and also
lug.org.uk for the mailing lists. These have the advantage that
everyone has the chance to provide updates (using git has the bonus of
allowing patches to be sent to the mailing list for discussion by all,
in the same fair way the majority of open source projects are run).

As for the simplistic nature of the site I proposed (also in response
to steve at nexusuk.org) - again, there's absolutely no need to re-invent
the wheel when it comes to content like blogs and member profiles -
Links to swlug groups on facebook, G+, twitter and the like give us
that without the faff, and with the bonus that SWLUG happenings will
have a much wider audience than if the content were posted solely on
swlug.org.

To be honest, given that, I think we could also probably get away
without having our own web domain, and we certainly don't need two of
them as are currently being paid for by some kind soul.

Cheers,

Mark