New Website

Currently, Gallery doesn't have a consistent presence on Internet. The public website is at galleryproject.org, the documentation and development informations are at codex.galleryproject.org, some of the code is on the SVN of SourceForge, some other will be soon at GitHub. There is two trackers and two code browsers.

This situation makes finding the good information really hard. This document is a proposal for a new organisation that must provide a better consistency and visibility. Benefits are that users can report bugs easily, potential contributors will be helped, and development will be more structured (so more efficient).

The goals

A public website : www.galleryproject.org. It is a "store" for the project. There should be :

• news
• forum
• documentation for the user (installation, how to use, FAQ)
• download
• access to demo

A development website : dev.galleryproject.org. This is the place that concentrate everything about development. The intented audience is the core team, the plugins developers, the themes developers, and people just interested to look at the code. There should be :

• a wiki (No user info here, only API, roadmap, ...)
• a bug tracker
• a code browser

A VCS : git.galleryproject.org

A demo : demo.galleryproject.org. A clean installation of the lastest version. It is resetted each hour to avoid squatting. (some of the more popular themes could be added to the demo ?)

A forge : forge.galleryproject.org. The goal is to group projects that turn around Gallery :

• parallels branches (Windows, PgSQL, ...)
• popular plugins and themes ?

The projects in the forge have their own wiki/bug tracker (it is important that bugs introduced by theses projects are not in the main bug tracker, it's up to the maintainer to follow up the ticket to the core team)

The resources

Human resources

The skills needed are :

• Web design : create an identity for the project and adapt it for the differents websites
• Web development : integrate the differents applications, may be some specifics developments
• System administration : manage the server, DNS, and backups, install the applications

Material resources

Gallery owns about 5 dedicated servers hosted in two differents datacenter. Currently, 3 or 4 of them are totally busy.

Dedicated servers allow Gallery to install what needed to provide desired services and to achieve a good integration.

Suggestions

• The homepage must be clear and efficient : a quick presentation, the last news and two big button "Try" (-> demo) and "Download". It should not be longest than a screen (no scrollbar)
• There must be no bridge between the public website and the two others except ONE link in the menu (eg: "Development | Forge"). This way, the end-user won't be lost in the dev except if he wanted it
• The sites must have the same design but must be clearly distinguable. For example : three colors themes, and three logo (the main logo and two adapted for dev and forge)
• A shared authentication system would be great. This way, the same login is valid for the forum, the bugtracker, and git (with a validation for git, of course)