[haiku-web] Re: Trac (reevaluated)

Michael Phipps wrote:
Waldemar and I have looked at dozens of packages. I honestly don't think that anyone has a clue how to build a CMS. These things were written by people who know, understand and HATE usability. They are almost as bad as they could be.

Indeed. To clarify, I just talked about one of the problems we have with current
CMS solutions on the IRC channel:
[10 Jun 06 16:02] [Beta]: mambo looks interesting
[10 Jun 06 16:04] wkornew: mambo is totally unusable
[10 Jun 06 16:06] wkornew: [Beta]: it greets you with a totally overloaded
interface that does not center around pages, but around special modules
[10 Jun 06 16:08] wkornew: in Typo3 every page is a container for other items
(which might also be pages). users and news and forums and posts are such items
[10 Jun 06 16:08] wkornew: now, in order to display news on some page you have
to create a new page and include the news module and point it to a folder
containing news items
[10 Jun 06 16:09] wkornew: this news module is part of the page and can be
placed wherever you want. it's basically a simple tag within the content of
your page
[10 Jun 06 16:10] wkornew: this is what Typo3 does, but it's extremely
complicated to use. with a few improvements and a better interface (see Plone's
item management system) it could become wonderfully easy
[10 Jun 06 16:11] wkornew: we want to be greeted with the website's page tree!
not with a load of modules and add-ons that perform their tasks independently
of the other pages
[10 Jun 06 16:11] wkornew: it must be so plain simple that it just works without
you having to think about it
[10 Jun 06 16:11] wkornew: you want to create news? just go to the news page and
say "Create news item"
[10 Jun 06 16:12] wkornew: you want to add text above the news page (the simple
intro I added)? just put it above the news module tag
[10 Jun 06 16:12] wkornew: you want to list a news summary on some other page
(the front page), but also have a news archive? just create two pages that
utilize the news module
[10 Jun 06 16:15] wkornew: there should not be any artificial barriers imposed
on you and you should see the content the same way you see it when you browse
the web page


So, honestly, we are sort of at an impasse. We continue to look at stuff and we wait for Railfrog. It seems to be headed in a better direction than anything else I have seen, but it is hard to judge on so little. 

Michael, maybe you should join their mailing list and help them (together 
with
me) to get usability right? They are very open to us.

As far as Trac... Honestly, the devs all seem to love Bugzilla. They use it, they love it, they aren't really inclined to change, as far as I can see. Waldemar and I don't think that it is very usable for non-devs. I don't personally see the need to press the issue, atm, because there are more than enough bugs to work on (that is to say, the devs are maxed out and a better bug tracker with gazillions more bugs wouldn't make Haiku any better right now).

I doubt that we will get a lot more reports, ATM (we don't have many
non-experts). Especially, if we require to sign-up and login. That will be the
biggest barrier keeping lazy people away from any bug tracker. But we can't fix
bugs if we can't contact the reporter (who, if possible, should confirm that the
bug is fixed).

I am interested in seeing what Trac can do, but, honestly, there is *NO* guarantee that it will be used. I haven't been a huge fan of the other Trac implementations that I have seen, but I know that it can easily be a implementation/configuration issue. 

There is no guarantee, but if it's better nobody will say anything against
switching to Trac. I won't do it if the developers are against it, but they
just say "we don't care since Bugzilla works for us". If they don't care I'll
care.

As far as writing copy, I haven't looked much at what is on the wiki. What I have looked at seems to be pretty good. I like the idea that someone other than me wants to add content to the website. Obviously that stuff needs review. I don't quite understand why people are more willing to edit a wiki than to send an email, but I guess what is, is.

In a wiki you immediately see the results and you can work on the *original*
material. Email are too hard to work with and it's not this "oh, I'll quickly
fix or write that...". It's not a quickly accessible method (unlike a wiki or a
community CMS).

As far as being open, part of the problem is that we are too distributed. We have some stuff about this in (this) list, some in private emails (from before this list existed), some in wiki, etc. That is another goal that I have for the new website - to tie all of the communication methods together so that there are no separate forums/wikis/email lists - that everything is tied together so that there is one and only one data stream for each area of Haiku. When a wiki page changes, folks who have signed up for email will get a link or a page in their email; it will be available via the website and a forum entry will be posted. One data stream, whether you like push or pull.

Yep, something like a forum/mailing-list/googlegroups hybrid with per-topic and
per-group subscriptions and email-replies similar to a mailing-list. Or if you
don't want to get emails you can manually watch for new posts. Whatever is
preferred and more appropriate. Also, you could easily reply to past topics
which you didn't receive.

Bye,
Waldemar Kornewald


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