Website Platform Discussion

[Eric Theise]

Hi all,

My trajectory with site-building is somewhat similar to David's except that
I ended up building less sites through CMSs and more using frameworks such
as Rails, Django, and Express. But lately I've taken a few steps back and
I've found Jekyll to be an excellent way to get the job done. I'll advocate
for it here because of its tight integration with GitHub. Updating a site
is a git push, and content updates can go through the same evaluation as
any other pull request.

Perhaps not immediately obvious is Jekyll's use of yaml objects to
replace/simulate database reads and I've found this incredibly useful in
situations where updates are infrequent.

http://jekyllrb.com/

Eric


On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 10:57 AM, David T. via gnucash-devel <
gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:

> In Bug 783240, I made some suggestions about modifying the website
> structure to improve the new user experience. As the discussion has
> developed, the implications of some of the suggestions have become more
> substantial, and John Ralls suggested that we bring the discussion to the
> devel list for broader discussion. Most significantly, John raised the
> possibility of changing the website from being a hand-coded PHP site, to
> one that uses a content management system (CMS).
>
> I think a CMS would be a good idea, assuming that the GnuCash website’s
> look and feel can be reasonably approximated—or an alternative look and
> feel can be accepted as the new norm. Having built websites manually, then
> coding my own php sites, and finally using a CMS, I can vouch for the
> benefits of a CMS. Creating and managing content and features is much
> easier with an established CMS. Creating a new version in a CMS that is
> tightly locked down would allow the focus to be on the content but still
> allow a broader number of contributors to possibly add to the GnuCash web
> presence—something that the current system doesn’t do well. As I see it,
> the GnuCash website doesn’t offer any significant special formatting or
> whiz-bang web features, so I think its basic content could be ported
> without a herculean effort.
>
> Two major questions occur to me:
>
> How would the current version control method of website management port
> over to a CMS? and,
> How would translations be handled in a CMS?
>
> I am sure there are other big questions as well...
>
> There are numerous CMS platforms out there; I am personally familiar with
> Drupal, and know that it can quickly provide a robust and feature-laden
> website. It seems to have tools for managing page translations, although I
> admit to only a superficial glance at what’s there, and I am not sure how
> that issue would get handled for the GnuCash use case. It even has the
> potential for providing a wiki experience, which might allow these two
> pieces of the GnuCash web experience to become more closely linked.
>
> I welcome your comments!
>
> Best,
> David
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