Website Platform Discussion

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay in responding; I was on vacation..

"David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Derek,
[snip]
> I will note that one of the problems I see with the website/wiki
> presence is precisely its static nature. Pages and information seem to
> get on the sites and never change or get updated.

I don't think that changing the website storage system would change
this.  Getting the website changed is a simple "git pull request", and
even if the underlying site changed to something else, I don't see this
process changing.  What that says to me is that changing to a CMS wont
make it any easier to change the content.

>        A number of the wiki
> pages I was just looking at had references to “new” features for v1.8,
> along with links to discussions in the mailing lists ca. 2002. There
> were references to resources that have long ago disappeared off the
> Internet, as well as discussions about issues that are no longer
> relevant to GnuCash in 2017—like discussions about code to create SQL
> data from an XML data file, which while perhaps still interesting, are
> nonetheless rendered rather moot with the incorporation of the SQL
> back end in 2.4.

Again, I dont see how changing the underlying infrastructure would help
here.

To me, the issue is a lack of "maintainers".  We would need people who
are responsible for the website and wiki content, monitor it, edit it,
ensure that it remains current and up to date.

I agree that the wiki is probably easier for the majority of users
because it doesn't use git.  But I'm perfect happy adding more people to
the "website" commiter ACL, giving more people the ability to push
updates to the website directly.

> As for the ongoing maintenance of a cms, I agree that it can be a
> pain. However, at least with Drupal, I find the process pretty quick
> to manage (in fact, I just installed an update today), and assuming
> that the GnuCash site would continue to be a basic site, it would
> likely not require many additional modules—thus keeping the update
> routines simpler. Moreover, with a bundled cms, you have web
> developers who are maintaining awareness of security issues and
> pushing out fixes for them. In this day of increased threat vectors
> online, can we be sure that the GnuCash site is immune to these new
> threats?

Considering right now www.gnucash.org is a quazi static website that
uses PHP for NEWS and Localization, I'm pretty sure it's immune.  The
attack surface of the current www.gnucash.org site is fairly small.  I
feel there's more of an attack vector against code/wiki.gnucash.org
specifically because it's running more complicated software (namely
mediawiki).

> Whether a new platform would encourage the community to maintain a
> vibrant web presence or not is of course debatable. but I think it’s a
> fair one to have.

Fair enough, but I would maintain that changing to a new platform that
still gates through GIT would, in essence, not change the community
willing to maintain a vibrant web presence.  At least I suspect it's
"git" that's the barrier to entry and not the fact that it's a raw
PHP-based website vs Drupal/et al.

In short -- I don't see how adding (or changing to) Drupal would
increase the number of people willing and able to keep the website
content up to date.

> David

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available