2011/3/21 Craig Bradney <<a href="mailto:cbradney@zip.com.au" target="_blank">cbradney@zip.com.au</a>> <div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"><div> On 3/21/11 11:28 AM, Camille Bissuel wrote: <blockquote type="cite"> Hi all, I'm certainly not an authority in this field, but willing to change our tools (SVN, mercurial, Drupal or whatever), a few weeks before the event is not really a bright idea in my point of view. We already spent weeks doing the actual LGM2011 website, and even if it's not prefect, it do the job. In the best scenario , trying to restart everything again now will only conduct to a beta quality website two weeks before the event. Furthermore, using a revision control system is not ideal because it increase complexity, and forbid quick testing in the production environment (it's easy to make a typo mistake in a javascript file for example). Drupal is a good CMS, but we will need time to set it up fully, so it will be wiser to use it for next year. Said simply, as already said by a number fo people here, let's focus on next tasks instead of re-doing the same ones again and again. Cheers, Camille </blockquote> </div> Well said.. don't change now.. develop what is there and make it right for 2011. You all liked it for 2010, 9 weeks is no time at all. Having said that though, you should not be doing testing in production, you should have a test environment for that! Using any revision control system could simply allow a checkout of a release version into prod. Adding a CMS on top complicates that, although a database dump from test to prod and a checkout should generally cover it. Craig </div></blockquote><div> :) OK. I thank everyone with their advice but (no hard feelings) this is what I would call back-seat driving and here is why : The actual website with all its content *is incomplete as of today* and very late on schedule despite the fact that most of the info herein is the same as in 2009 for the venue and mostly the same as in 2010 for most of the rest of the information. I have asked during last fall that the site points to 2011 instead of 2010 but it took nonetheless months to get that. On January 6 I rang the bell again offering local help for the website and got answered that everything was under control. In February — on schedule and in sync with all past years — we have come up with a draft Press Release and started to activate the Pledgie campaign. We targeted beginning of March and extended this towards a couple week-ends later, sometimes around March 10. On March 7 I have sent the logo of a new sponsor: it is still not on the website 14 days later. Meanwhile the website was still not easily updatable by the very few people who should be able to do this — including myself and rejon and a few others (very few people in fact). Access to edit simple links was not allowed or counterintuitive and parts of the pages were broken. So we thought, yes, that the tool we use for the site is not the right tool, no matter if it worked well or not last year. The actual switch to Drupal is something that was very rapidly discussed on IRC and agreed upon as quickly. It is supposed to be done within a day or two, with a proven tool that the community knows perfectly. Help if anything goes wrong will always be available on all time zones. Things have to be done and they have to be done quickly. We'll have plenty of time to discuss the pros and cons of doing such and such change in the post-mortem. * * * Back to the original thread * * * My main point was and still is today that we need the full access to the website so we can update the info as soon as it needs to be updated. This cannot suffer any further delay. We need a form so people can register and this form has to be updated to reflect the reality of 2011. We do have a form. Let's update it and put it on the server. NEW 2011 - We need a form so people can submit talk and so we can use the data downstream and organise it the way we want. For this the wiki is not sufficient. We need a banner on each LGM projecs website (at least) and for whoever wants to use it. We need statistics. And we need to have all the positive energy going into this. There are other things not listed here that will be all facilitated once we have this site up and running with all the functionalities we need. Thanks to all giving a hand ! Louis </div></div>