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Marc Paré wrote:
I have re-read all of the posts and thus far: ... 
Have I missed any? Please add points to this list that have come to a 
resolution of debate among the contributors of this thread.

I have re-read all of them too, not only your summary, and I still see
we have strategic choices to make.

1) We shouldn't be discussing on a website, but on something more
remarkable. Not in terms of features (I agree in keeping out mailing
lists and stuff that is not web-related), but as seeing this as a huge
opportunity for creating a nice, remarkable, network of websites. And,
if the Document Fondation has a future, it will need this: it already
does, just open http://extensions.libreoffice.org 

A proper discussion would not fit the deadlines and tools the Document
Foundation has now: if a decision has to be taken now, it will miss the
bigger scope. If the Document Foundation must choose a tool that will be
flexible enough to rebuild all the current OpenOffice.org infrastructure
on it (e.g.: OOo site; Extensions; TCM; QATrack), then Drupal is that
tool; I can't imagine how to rebuild the Extensions site and all
processing in Silverstripe, for one. So the whole idea of "choosing a
tool just for the site" is short-sighted; build it on any technology,
but it will come the time when a really powerful tool has to be chosen
to give the community a unified user experience across all different
sites, and Drupal can hardly have rivals here.

2) Moving to a database-based CMS can imply loss of traceability of
changes. The current CVS infrastructure, as bad as it can be, allows to
see a full log of changes very easily. Drupal has a killer feature here:
site settings can be exported to PHP code, shared among a distributed
development team through any revision control system (SVN, git,
whatever) and applied in a safe way to the running site. It is very
important that we are able to answer the question "Who enabled
this permission, when and why?" easily and reliably, and the Drupal
Features module does this: it automatically monitors site settings and
exports them, so answering this question is just a matter of reading the
changelog. I didn't see anything like this in Silverstripe; is it there?

3) How do you plan to implement translations? (from a visitor's point
of view, not technically). I mean, the current http://www.openoffice.org
site is in English only; you need to go to http://de.openoffice.org to
see content in German, but that one is a totally different site. On the
other hand, the Silverstripe demo (and of course Drupal too) seems to
support translation of the single pages: but is that what you want? From
what I could see (pumbaa has been down for me for the last two hours)
you also foresee N-L subsites. A choice must be made between:
- Having translatable pages
- Having localized websites, with independent structure but same login
- Having both (not acceptable from my point of view, too confusing)

These kinds of decisions are much more important than a demo in my
opinion: then, I understand that on this and other important matters the
Steering Committee is in a hurry and it needs things done quickly rather
than properly. I just fear, and my arguments are above, that choosing
the "nice out of the box" Silverstripe will hinder further
development... Unless there is the attitude to rediscuss this in a few
months, like the "Codebase migration from CVS" discussion, that was
resolved by temporarily migrating to SVN as a quick decision with the
promise (then fulfilled) to migrate to a distributed SCM after one year.

Best regards,
  Andrea Pescetti.


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