News updates on frontpage

A little background on this.

As of the time of my writing this, I am in the process of writing a forums plugin for Trac. This will be a complete replacement for PHPBB, that will rely on Trac's wiki-code facility for formatting. Each project will have it's own set of forums, which will add an extra dimension to how Dsource is run at the moment.

While the forum display will be under a 'forums' tag in the Trac menu, digests, recent posts and forum activity can be displayed anywhere under the wiki via some macros that tie into the new plugin. A slight variant of those plugins will be used for displaying blog-like digests for the main page - so the blog relies on the forums for data management and interaction.

This scheme comes with some reccomendations for use. I propose that the forum for Tango have forums for at least "Blog" and "Help", and any others that are needed after that. The "Blog" forum should be locked down to moderators for posting new topics, but replies to those topics will be open to all. All the other forums within Tango should be more open, to allow users to post their own topics as calls for help, generating bug reports, or proposals for new functionality.

See #148 for more details.

Made an informal reccomendation to Brad here: http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=12920

Basically, an RSS aggregator process is the most straight-forward way to get 100% of everything going on in all the projects, site-wide. This is because:

• Trac timelines are almost 100% generated content
• Trac's data-model is inherently single-project based - every project has its own
• Postgres cannot (at this time) query across databases

A Trac/python based solution would have to do no less than:

• log into every single project database to get timeline data
• have in an .ini file the login data for all projects in one place
• use a modified Trac core that can query against multiple project DB's
• aggregate all the data harvested into a timeline

This would work, but hacking the timeline generators out of every portion of the core of Trac will prove time consuming and troublesome, and will likely cause a maintenance nightmare.

Please disregard the previous comment. It really doesn't apply to this ticket.

I have a working prototype for this, and the doc comments macros on my workstation. Screenshots forthcoming.

One question that is still on my mind: how should the markup be styled. I know this is a graphic design concern, which is technically my problem anyway. But I'm open to suggestions.

A possibility to group this somehow (boxes?) would be fine. And preferrably styled such that it fits with the rest :)

#329 is a blocker for this. Otherwise, the functionality is done.

The Sandbox now has the 'news' (RecentTopics?) macro up top. I'm looking into revising the L&F on this list to be a little more readable. There are also a few subtle bugs, like the number of replies being incorrect, the sort order going by last post date, and the max chars per post being ignored.

http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/wiki/Sandbox

For frontpage use, it will probably need to be able to only show the headers, and in a box. What is shown on the sandbox page would fill the whole front page :)

I think I saw a mention on this towards the r69 - if that is the case, how is it used?

Lars: take a look at the Sandbox. The macro there can be used verbatim on the main page. I'm not 100% happy with what the site CSS has done to my macro's output, but it should be serviceable as-is.

I still find it a bit big, but it may not be a problem if it can be put in a box an be linewrapped.

What I see is the problem with the frontpage, is that we only have the possibility to work vertically. That is, if you add something, it has to be above something and below something else. IMO, the frontpage should be modellable, in an easy way, much more like the Wikipedia frontpage, or python.org.

Any progress here? We really should have a proper news box on the front page soon.

I've changed the Sandbox to show what the front page could look like with the current macro configuration.

What I want to know is: is this layout acceptable, or should I work toward a different style?

Hmm, personally I'm not too happy with this, maybe the frontpage is special enough to warrant using HTML on it, aka what is done on the DDL frontpage. The frontpage as of now is too much a list of short paragraphs, and the structure of the News section is an anomaly in that, having different font size on items, and a lot of air. I just feel that the content (at least all of it together) don't lend itself very well to being put in paragraphs one under the other.

I would truly love if it was possible to design the page a bit more, like most other frontpages with quite a bit of content of different sorts. The News in a box to the right, maybe a box somewhere containing the links for users of other libraries, and so on.

What I'd love to see is more of a blog-style front page--the sandbox still looks like a wiki. I have no idea what this would require from a technical standpoint however.

front page needs to be configurable to look something like python.org ... with distinct areas of information, much like the front page of a newspaper

Thanks all for the comments. What I'm hearing is that we need to use a more HTML-oriented template that flows more like a proper front-page. This can be done.

The easiest way to proceed is to embed some HTML snippets that cradle chunks of wiki code, such that we get a more columnized layout. That's practically what CSS was made for.

I'll play with a few things and bump this ticket when I have some samples prepared in the Sandbox.

There are some plugins that should make it easier to avoid embedding the necessary html in the front page wiki code itself (by using macros/templates). I believe the one below is the most promising. Note that the frontpage of Wikipedia use similar templates for each of their boxes.

http://wikitemplates.ufsoft.org/

The important part of this is now solved. I'd like to have a timeline (commits and forum posts especially) widget similar to the boxes there, but it may be crowded enough already.