The JOS website is going through a major overhaul to improve navigation/features for JOS members, and to improve the use-friendliness of the JOS site for newcomers and members of the press. Please use this page to add feature/change requests, comment on the current overhaul progress, and complain about new "collateral features" added during the overhaul. Notice that many of the improvements are wiki page creation/edits. So anyone that wants to help can start tackling these items.
IainS
Phase I: Cleanup I (March 5-11)
- Flushing the old wiki crud for good. The current version is at metamech. The new version will be at sourceforge. So the old files lurking on jos.org are useless. If anyone thinks differently, now is the time to speak up.
- Retrieve and archive the jos mailman archives and mailing list subscriber addresses. I believe this is the only thing of value here. If anyone thinks differently, now is the time to speak up.
- Flush mailman and everything along with it.
- Retrieve and archive the jos CVS contents. This has already been done so its redundant. However, I want to make it available one last time before flushing it for good. The download will probably be made available at sourceforge not at jos.org. Any one with interest in these files will have one last opportunity to grab it.
- Flush the jos CVS.
- Warn members with member specific contents to retrieve it before it gets flushed. This is your warning. You have one week. I believe everything there is totally old and abandoned so the time period is relatively short. My quick perusal of the directories showed them mostly to be temporary development related files that are irrelevant now. I will try and contact the members directly as well but I don't know if I have valid addresses for everyone.
- Gilbert. I think your redist and mirror stuff will need to be moved. I propose moving your distributions as file downloads on the sourceforge jos project or to their own sourceforge projects. The web browse-able directories I think will need to be either hosted on a site you provide or removed. I believe that the file download area on sourceforge will be sufficient to get downloads to people so I'm tentatively proposing dropping your web directories of the mirror contents when you move it to sourceforge. I'm very much open to discussions on this. This is in preparation for actions taken two weeks from now... read on... btw, if you don't respond to this email soon, I'll contact you via email directly on this matter. I realize you put a lot of work into the redist and mirror stuff and I don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water.
- Revamp web pages to reflect the changes on the site.
- Redirect mailing list links to point to sourceforge and eliminate all traces of mailman on jos.org (from a web perspective).
- Flush misc files hanging around that I can't figure out what they are. :) There are a surprisingly large number of them.
Phase II: Cleanup II (March 12-18)
- Flush member specific directories.
- Flush Gilbert's redist and mirror stuff.
- Anticipate that sfWiki will be ready and redeploy wiki on sourceforge and update website. This may not happen until the following week, or Todd may beat me to the punch and have it done this week. Go Todd!!!
- Revamp web pages to reflect changes on the site.
- Code the website for next week (see below).
Phase III: Migrate jos.org to ejip.net
ejip.net has been generous enough to offer a sponsored hosting of our site on their servers. This is a big improvement for us as the ejip.net servers support servlets and ejb's!!! yeah. We finally can implement our web site in java!
- Move main page to ejip.net as a single purpose, stupid servlet. This one page servlet only displays the home page.
- Once again, update website to reflect changes and redirect DNS to point to ejip.net
Phase IV: General improvements (in order of priority)
- Create a basic announce/news system to handle announcement of new products, projects, etc. A process I'm doing manually.
- Create a membership management system so we can finally create a structured jos membership database.
- Investigate and hopefully deploy a Java wiki. Yes, another wiki. The main advantage I seek here is to merge the wiki membership with jos membership so jos members only have to have two memberships... sourceforge and jos.org. Instead of the three they will have, sourceforge, sfwiki, and jos.org. I can easily be pursuaded that this is a low priority so let me know if any of the others below are more important for you.
- Project tracker system so we can finally figure out what projects are part of jos, and where they are, and what their status is (active, dormant, etc). Project information is managed by assigned members, and announcements will automatically display in the announce system. :) Hopefully also add email notification for people "watching" a project. automation finally. :)
- Namespace reservation system. So we can argue about and allocate the namespace we'll use within the jos project. This and project tracking are supposed to be done in the wiki but I think the freeform nature of the wiki and the structure of the process clash. Hopefully this new system allows us to get this process back on track.
- Workflow system for publishing "Official" documents on the jos site without me doing it manually. I'm especially looking at the ability to do things like maintain docs such as the constitution, policy book, etc., and official project documentation that doesn't fall into a wiki style.
- Others. You suggest it, I'll consider it. You build it, I'll integrate it. I don't have a framework picked out yet but if its an EJB it will probably be pretty easy to integrate into the site. Right now I'll probably use a java.apache.org framework or enhydra.
I'm personally considering trying to reproduce many of the site features of sourceforge so we can eliminate that dependence too. Of course that's a whole lot of work so I'm not sure if its even worth considering. On the other hand, there is a ton of opensource java server side apps out there so implementing it may not be as hard as it sounds... :)
Comments, flames, etc. Please edit this page and post to the mailing list so that everyone may participate in the discussion.
March 5, 2001 IainS (iain shigeoka)
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