[webteam] radical simplicity

[Peter Saint-Andre]

Sorry for the delay -- I'm behind on email. But I've been thinking about
this on and off for a week so here are my thoughts.

On 05/12/2008 5:00 PM, Artur Hefczyc wrote:
> 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"?

Jabber is infrastructure. You don't see a community form around
infrastructure -- at least not a community of end users. There's no
community around electric power, municipal water, interstate highways,
IPv4, SMTP, HTTP, or any other piece of infrastructure. And that's fine!
But we need to realize that non-technical people will never get excited
about Jabber / XMPP. They might get excited about certain applications
that are built using XMPP (say, Twitter or even a particular Jabber
client perhaps), but never about the underlying technology itself.

> 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.

A community of geeks.

> 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 don't think we'll see a lot of people use the jabber.org website.
Mostly they will use it to find a link to something else. We don't need
a dynamically-generated website with database-driven content and so on
just so that people can be linked off to somewhere else.

> 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.

True.

>> 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.

Right, because all the project details were updated by me, in spare
moments when I wasn't working 70 hours a week, by hand using raw SQL
commands (at least after we disabled phpmyadmin because we suspected
that it allowed some attacker to install a rootkit). Anything would be
better than that!

>> 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.

We had a custom PHP application. We disabled it (see above about the
rootkit) because we were worried about hackers. So therefore we wrote
some scripts that output the PHP as static files instead of dynamically
generated each page on each request. I really don't think we need that
kind of flexibility just to display some helpful intro pages plus the
software listings.

> 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.

Given that XMPP is an XML technology, we might do better with that than
with a PHP-based CMS. BTW we use static XHTML files for much of
xmpp.org, and the rest is generated by XML+XSLT (XEPs, registries,
etc.). It's stable, it's known, and it never has a database error.

[Yes, I freely admit that I don't trust databases...]

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

How long do we live with a broken website? I don't know the answer, but
I do know that I find the current site to be embarrassing. It looks
great thanks to mray's work, but the db errors and inability to display
simple software pages is sad.

> Ok, I am shutting up already....

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it.

Peter
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