Status of Conservancy website & working together to improve it.

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Yuvi,

Thanks for your offer to help and sorry it took me a few days to get
back to you.

I've included mina86, denver, tmarble, and tbm who have historically
helped some with the website as well: this thread now includes everyone
who has ever done anything to help with the website from a technical
angle.

Yuvi Panda wrote at 18:19 (PST) on Sunday:
> I am trying to set up the website to run locally and running into
> various issues (very old version of django required, a
> 'djangocommonsettings module I can't find), and couldn't find any more
> detailed setup instructions. I will be grateful if you can either
> provide me with more info or point me to a bug tracker so I can file
> more specific bugs :)

There is no bug tracker; please realize that I maintain the website
along with thousands of other tasks that I have to do for Conservancy
(we only have three people on staff), so I run from urgent problem to
urgent problem and things don't get the attention the deserve.

As it stands, the easiest way for you to help with the website is give
me small patches to fix smaller things you found.

As for getting a test environment running, this is edging toward the
critical path for me, because, besides the obvious danger of making
site-breaking changes live due to not having a test location -- I used
to have a working instance on my local machine but don't anymore --
there's also the issue that I need to make major changes to the django
apps that will require breaking the site for a while do to so.

If you want to build a list of things that don't work when you try to
get it running locally, that would help.  I will probably have to do
this in this in the period between 15 January and 27 January anyway, as
I want to get a test site working to make some major changes during that
period.

After that, I can update the README.md in the repository to explain.

For the moment, here's what I've done; I've created an email list
<website-hackers at sfconservancy.org> which I've cc'ed so this thread is
archived there, and those of you on this thread  can subscribe to that
list (or not, as you prefer).

As tbm and mina86 know, the k.copyleft.org repository instance is not
quite working yet, so you may be able to create accounts there but I'm
not sure if they'll work or not -- in large part because email
notifications to confirm passwords and such aren't working.  I need to
put aside an hour or so to configure email on that server and get it
working.  So, as I say, if you have urgent-ish changes that will make an
immediate impact to improve the site and don't break stuff too much
(i.e., changes to HTML, CSS, and Javascript -- but not Python code
changes) feel free to email them to me and I should be able to apply
them.

After 15 January, I will be able to give a few cycles to think about
what to do about the website.  I know it needs attention, and I'm just
balancing a lot of complicated things.
-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn
President & Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy
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