Personal Statement (was: Re: [libreoffice-website] What's the official policy about the LibO website: Drupal or no Drupal?)

Hi all,

sorry ... I seem to be a bit lost at the moment. To be honest, I neither
have the technical competence, nor do I know all the details with regard
to our community processes.

What I currently perceive is, that there is a discussion covering
"Silverstripe" and "Drupal" and some decisions / recommendations that
have been made by the SC. Personally, I do miss a discussion like "Yes
you are right. The alternative in XYZ is ABC. Do you think that this
will work for you / can be implemented in this or that way?"

That is what I currently think - personally:

      * The current website is - at a first glance - somehow simple to
        understand, but fails when looking at other details. So yes, we
        do need a viable alternative...

      * The Silverstripe site requires some love to communicate to our
        users that LibreOffice is high quality. This both refers to the
        editorial content (David is working on it), and an appealing
        visual design. If we fail with the site content, we won't need
        any website technology successor ;-)

      * The Drupal website team is working hard to provide a scalable
        alternative that suits needs from man others. But, it appears to
        me the there is some "rush" (we originally considered half a
        year to be sufficient to get, and to incorporate the desired
        input). Don't get me wrong - I'm deeply impressed how ambitious
        the plans are for providing a perfectly set-up Drupal. But,
        personally I'm so busy at the moment (or maybe I am just unable
        to manage my time properly), that I fail to provide any
        substantial input that has been requested long time ago. The
        consequence: I sometimes feel a bit hesitant when it comes to
        the Drupal website - because I don't know whether my
        requirements are met (my = statements related to Design Team
        needs). Maybe this is similar to other guys here ...

Finally, to me it is not about the technological approach, but the
better solution that suits our needs. And - as far as I can see - there
are many more challenging requirements than to "simply" set up a good
web infrastructure. OOo had a huge success, because of many non-web
tools - and the web based tools to promote and to work on the software
itself. So my question is, whether we can step back and think about,
whether there is a chance to improve both tools, streamline processes,
ease work? If yes, then the decision is somehow easy ;-)

So my plea is - please be patient with us all to finally deliver
LibreOffice 3.3, let us take some deep breath (some of us are working
since months without any significant pause), and pick up the discussions
on the "next gen infrastructure". In the meantime ...

Please consider to work together to make the Silverstripe based page a
success, and thus, make LibreOffice a success. The more we learn within
these next weeks and months, the better we will know why and how Drupal
may be a better match for us.

For those closely related to Drupal website development (with - maybe -
less experience working on Silverstripe), please put together all your
knowledge and try to work on the issues other members like Sophie do
mention. In my point-of-view, some small proof-of-concepts may help to
let other people understand how things will get better ... and you'll
get the chance to get "hands-on" based feedback ;-)

Okay, sorry for the lengthly mail, but (to me) this was very important.

Please read on ...

Am Donnerstag, den 16.12.2010, 07:47 +0930 schrieb Michael Wheatland:
> > And yes, you got input from various groups that in part already use
> > drupal for their work and stuff, but still this is hardly "the
> > community".
>
> If you can suggest more ways to get feedback than the mailing lists
> and the wiki I am all ears. 

Personally, I do scan the blog postings quite regularly. It would be
great to get some easy-to-grasp information there. Then, the progress is
much less hidden (again, a very personal statement, because I'm unable
to dig deeper in the wiki) and the chance for explaining the thoughts
that might improve the processes (e.g. Sophie talks about) is much
better.

I'm sorry if this puts even more workload on you (and the team), but I
do think it will pay off in the end. Less (felt) surprises, less
discussions afterwards. How does that sound?

Cheers,
Christoph


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