[webteam] radical simplicity

[Artur Hefczyc]

Well, the first question which has been asked already is:
What do we want www.jabber.org to be?

There have been many discussions about this and as far as I remember
we wanted it to be "community driven website".

What community? XFS? XMPP devs? Jabber "users"?

Anyway, if it is supposed to be a community driven website then it must
be interactive and dynamic. And depending on the "drivers" and audience
functionality needs to be selected.

If it is interactive and dynamic it will be human error prone and it  
will have
bugs. The more people are using it the more chance something happens.

I agree that static pages are the most reliable and the least likely  
an error
on a single page may bring whole website down.

Otherwise we have some web application. Regardless this is Drupal or a  
custom
Web PHP application or anything else it will be error prone. There is no
way we can run away from it.

>
> As I said in the chat, I believe Drupal is simply the wrong tool for  
> the job.
>

I am not saying Drupal is the best for our needs or is the worst but  
switching
the software just because of problems is a wrong way. There will be  
problems
with other software too. All we need to do is to think what system  
fits into our
needs and then use the system solving all the problems.

Drupal is a complex tool with thousands of modules therefore gives lots
of functionality which can be applied to many use cases. But also there
is a high possibility for bugs and conflicts between modules.
And also sticking to Drupal at all costs is not a good way. If we find  
some other
system which might be a better tool for us, in a long run it does make  
sense
to sacrifice existing effort which has been put into Drupal and do the  
switch.

> The listing of clients, libraries, and servers on www.jabber.org is
> simply a hack as far as I can see. Even before the www.jabber.org
> revolution I was arguing that Drupal wasn't the tool for the job. It
> seems I was outnumbered though (and judging by the replies in this
> thread, I probably still am) by Drupaleers :)

Maybe it just does a good job for many.
I personally very much prefer current www.jabber.org based on Drupal
over the old website where it was quite hard to update project details.

> I think these things should be replaced with something else. I
> originally suggested PHP, but given the choice between that and clean
> XML+XSLT, I think the latter is more flexible for us.

What you mean by PHP? Custom own application? Drupal is the PHP
application.
XML+XSLT - I guess there are many nice and efficient XSLT processors
but I wouldn't call it nice and clean. How many XSLT experts do we have?
XML? We then need DTD or XML Schema and "community" needs to
create valid XML documents...
I am not saying this is impossible. It might be just not necessarily  
nicer
simpler than Drupal.

My suggestion is: www.jabber.org is really new stuff and let's give it  
some time
to settle down.

Ok, I am shutting up already....

Artur
-- 
Artur Hefczyc
http://www.tigase.org/
http://artur.hefczyc.net/