Fixing the website

[Simon Wistow]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 10:12:49AM +0000, Paul Makepeace said:
> One point that I know has stopped a few people is that the website
> is checked into CVS but due to some legacy binary breakage can't be
> checked out.  Is this still the case?

As far as I know, yes.

There are three problems with the website 

1) It has awful usability
2) It's not in any practical VCS
3) The build system is constructed from purest crack.

The second one is solvable provided that we don't mind losing our 
history.

The first one is solveable if somebody is willing to spend a bit of time 
with some books on usability. The aforementioned "Don't make me think" 
is good as are "Information Architecture on the World Wide Web", 
"Blueprints for the WWW" by Christina Wodtke and "Elements of User 
Experience" by Jesse James Garret. Jakob Neilsen's worth a read too as 
is Don Norman's "Psychology of Everyday things"


The last one is ... well, to be honest there two schools of thought 
here. The first school of thought says "If it ain't broke, don't fix 
it". The other half points out the build system involves 3 (three!) 
sepearte Template Toolkit compilation phases and some XSLT. The second 
half then threatens the first half with extreme violence before abruptly 
breaking down into a sobbing mass muttering something about 
'generate-site-from-xml.pl'

So, if anybody is *actually* interested in fixing it then I'll put the 
time into setting up a SVN server and checking everything and writing 
some docs. 

However if the monkeys are just frantically dancing, pausing only to 
fling faeces at people, then I won't bother. 

Simon