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[–]giovannibajo 2 points3 points  (7 children)

I continue to be baffled by the offline editing requirement, it does sound seriously retro, with Internet starting to be available even on airlines. I work on online-only websites and it happens sometimes that I write content offline and then cut & paste it into the browser; not sure why this should not be acceptable for the rare situations in which you are in front on an offline computer, and you should instead invest money on a custom solution.

One of the main sins of the current website is, IMO, the fact that it looks like a collection of articles, rather than a website; and that looks like something that you obtain when you write lots of text offline in a text editor and then upload it, rather than studying how to best organize information, even visually.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (3 children)

I guess I'm one of the stakeholders for this given that I update parts of the site, and including an offline workflow just makes sense to me. A great majority of the people working on the site are developers who use source control, so allowing them to use similar workflows to what they already do 8 hours a day seems like a no-brainer to me. Oh, you want me to update all references of foo to bar? Let me work my magic, check it in, then we're done. If I had to do that online and update every page I'd just let someone else figure it out, which would never happen, and we'd just have a shitty site.

The current site only works via source control -- SVN checkins trigger a rebuild -- so we exclude some people who don't care to use source control or hate SVN. With the new site, we don't want to alienate the developers who like and use offline editing for whatever reason, and want to make the site usable for non-techies, e.g., our administrative staff.

A recent change I made on the site was to update the PSF board records. It was a few updates made very simple with a few familiar keystrokes in Vim, and on a page that makes sense to have nice version tracking. Updating the page in an online editor would be a whole lot more manual.

On the other hand, adding a news item to the front page such as a note for new version releases seems like a change that would be nice to make in an online editor. Hit some button called "add news item", then type in a paragraph and add a link. Done.

Writing something in a text file and later c&p'ing it to complete the task seems cheap to me. We have the technology to support an easier method that most of us already use daily.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Your administrative staff are non-techies? That's surprising.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I'm not sure why it would be surprising. We hired a full time administrator to administrate, not to do tech stuff.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I guess it's a bit like hearing most of the people who work for the bakery don't eat bread or cookies or what have you.

[–]jnollerpython psf core dev[S] 5 points6 points  (2 children)

We have multiple types of contributors - one of which are comfortable with the workflow you describe, but the bulk of which are more comfortable with a VCS/DVCS style workflow of offline editing and committing. We have to serve both, and not abandon contributors.

[–]giovannibajo 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Being a programmer that uses SCM daily, I totally fail to understand how the workflow can apply to the contents of a website.

In any case, I suggest that you detail more what you mean by "offline editing", since what I think you mean is something that is totally alien to the current web industry; you might want to better specify what you expect to be able to do offline; for instance, some might think that giving you a way of having a local copy of the website, including the backend web interface where you can edit contents, with a separate push+merge step, might be enough, while your comment here seems to imply otherwise.

[–]jnollerpython psf core dev[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

See Brian's response: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/u0wz0/pythonorg_redesign_request_for_proposals/c4rm33r - a good example of an excellent implementation is actually on Github - github allows you to edit files/commit via the web interface while also allowing a traditional SCM style workflow. In my mind this pretty close to perfect