Website Platform Discussion

[John Ralls]

> On Jun 22, 2017, at 9:05 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I suggested that a switch to a CMS might be necessary after David suggested and Geert supported having a carousel on the front page. Introducing and maintaining features like that in hand-maintained PHP strikes me as rather technical as well as error prone and likely to introduce security risks as AFAIK none of us are expert at that kind of code.

I don't know Drupal but I do maintain a Joomla-based website (http://californiaancestors.org). Joomla allows non-programmers to easily edit content in a more-or-less WYSIWYG editor. The editor also has a "source" mode for working directly with the html and css to get exactly the look you want. That would certainly broaden the base of potential contributors to the many who wig out at the very thought of opening a code editor.

The php code behind the CMS is certainly amenable to version control, but the content is stored in a database (typically MySQL). It would be possible to get that under git control but it would take a bit of work, as would implementing a post-update hook to convert a git diff into the necessary PHP-MyAdmin commands to update the content database.

Regards,
John Ralls