[Project-managers] project home pages

[Laszlo Ladanyi]

Hello all,

In the past project managers have expressed the desire that their
project's home page should be some sort of static home page, not the
Trac page. By static page I mean that it's good ol' hand edited html.

We (Matt and Laci) have spent some time this afternoon creating
RewriteRules, scripts, etc, and found that it's tricky... So here is
our proposal for handling this. We put this on the agenda for next
Tue's TLC conf call (also attached this proposal there). Feel free to
add comments/suggestions/rewriterules and scripts :-) there and to
call in (https://projects.coin-or.org/CoinTLC/wiki/MeetingNotes013007).

- www.coin-or.org/PROJ goes to the static pages,
projects.coin-or.org/PROJ goes to the Trac page of PROJ (this makes
referring to one from the other easier, too).

- In the list of the projects there would be links both to the Trac
and the static pages of the projects.

- We would provide a default index.html for each project that doesn't
have static pages, which would redirect to the project's Trac page.

- The static pages of project PROJ are kept in svn in a dir named 'html'
in the root of the project's repository (so you check it out with 'svn
co https://projects.coin-or.org/svn/PROJ/html PROJ-html'). Anytime
anything is committed into this directory a post-commit script will
automatically push out the changes on the web. This makes it easy for
PMs to maintain their own static pages.  Moving the existing static
webpages from the CoinWeb svn repository would be handled by a script
that preserves history as well.

Granted, this solution sort of sidesteps the issue of the home page
(creates two "home" pages), but if we want to publish a single home
page link and leave it to the PM's discretion whether it links to Trac
or static pages, apache rewrite rules get exceedingly nasty if a
request comes for anything but the top level page (either on Trac or
static). We just couldn't find a ruleset that would work properly (let
alone an elegant ruleset).

The Projects page of www.coin-or.org would list both links for each
project.

A separate question about the website: should there be an
http://projects.coin-or.org, or it should immediately be redirected to
https://projects.coin-or.org?  To date, we have followed the latter
policy.  We need to do so for password exchanges for svn and Trac
logins, but now that projects' static pages will also be accessible at
projects.coin-or.org/PROJ/chrome/site/ or
projects.coin-or.org/PROJ/html/, server load *might* become an issue.

What do you think of this setup? Is it reasonable or a pain in the rear
end; messes up everything (including people's bookmarks) or more-or-less
transparent change; whatever else you can think of...?

--Laci