[CREATE] Access to LGM website

[a.l.e]

hi louis,

> 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.

as far i can tell, i've put most if not all the information i got into 
the website.

the forms for signup and for submitting a talk were ready for weeks but 
you changed your mind on how they should work / what field had to be in 
there last week.
the form for signing up *is* ready for testing but on hold because of 
the drupal transition (you want everything editable by everyboy, so we 
will have to port the form to drupal).
the form for submitting talks is quite advanced and needs a couple of 
hours of work but we will start it over with drupal.

> I have asked during last fall that the site points to 2011 instead of 2010
> but it took nonetheless months to get that.

not true. we agreed that the default site should point to 2010 until the 
end of the year because this was what most people would want to see: an 
archive of the past edition.
the change from the one site to the other was quite fast (even if i 
didn't find out at first how it was done... sorry.)

> 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.

not because of the website, afaict.

> On March 7 I have sent the logo of a new sponsor: it is still not on the
> website 14 days later.

on march 7 i don't seem to have got any mail from you. never heard of a 
new sponsor, sorry.

> 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 site is not trivial to update: true. but as many people as they want 
can learn it and update the content. and the system is quite solid and 
has very good features, but you have to take the time to learn it.
but that's history. now we have drupal and it will probably be easier to 
edit content and the rest, too.

btw, the fact that you could not correctly login anymore is still a mistery.

> The actual switch to Drupal is something that was very rapidly discussed on
> IRC and agreed upon as quickly.
well, yes, we can say it that way...

> It is supposed to be done within a day or
> two, with a proven tool that the community knows perfectly.

you suppose it to take one or two day...

for the full content and template to been take over, i would say that 
two weeks is a minimal timeframe.
as for now, the only proposal we got for porting the template (html + 
css) to drupal is two weeks for a first draft. i think it can be done a 
bit faster, but we still have to find somebody who can do it faster.


we will see how many people can work on it and for how many hours...
personally, i've committed most of my weekend to check the features we 
need in drupal 6 and 7 and i'm ready to upload a first test version of 
drupal 6 to the lgm server.

as for now, we are still waiting for a database being created on the lgm 
server.

have a nice day
a.l.e