[Project-managers] Re: [Coin-tlc] (no subject)

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 stefan at mathematik.hu-berlin.de wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> - 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.
>
> I think two links for each project would be a bit confusing for the user.
> Is it (technically easy) possible that the project manager choose whether
> he want the Trac or the static page listed in the projects list?
> I doubt that there is a project that needs both a Trac and a static main
> webpage. Of course, it should be able to mix both, so that there is some
> static content and some content in the Trac system. But you don't need two
> "Welcome to Project..." pages.

Well, every project has a Trac page, but static pages are optional.  And, 
of course, Trac pages can link to static pages and vice versa.  But what's 
difficult is to find an automatic way for projects to designate whether 
the Trac page or the static page is the "home" page.

Another example of this sort of arrangement is SourceForge.  There, 
typically, www.sourceforge.net/projects/PROJNAME is the SF page (analogous 
to our Trac page) and PROJNAME.sourceforge.net is the static site (or a 
redirect there if it's maintained offsite in a separate domain).  Projects 
can publish either URL (or the external one) as their "home" page. 
Projects on SF have to have an SF page, but they need not have static 
pages (although in that case, I'm not sure how SF works--a sensible thing 
would be to redirect to the SF page).

>
>> - 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.
>
> Or can you just link to the static page which has the default redirect to
> the trac page, and the project manager can remove this redirect if he
> wants to make a static page?
>
> Stefan
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> Coin-tlc at list.coin-or.org
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>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs