Re-engineering the MKPM website

[Tony Edwardson]

Hi Tom

Your input is always welcome.
A major motivation for this is a reason to learn Catalyst.
I don't really have a problem with the current site
The idea started with a request from Gabor Szabo in Perl Weekly to 
include up to date links in Perl Monger websites.
I should be an interesting project and any rate.
Another motivation is my personal desire to keep presentation away from 
data - we could do all this with
a series on linked templates or by using Dancer or equivalent - we may 
end up doing that in the end - but I want to see how easy it will be in 
Catalyst.

Cheers
Tony
On 12/04/2012 21:52, Tom Hukins wrote:
> Hi, Tony.
>
> Although I'm no longer active in the group, and so don't have any say
> in the Web site's future, I have a few thoughts that I feel I should
> share:
>
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 09:32:32PM +0100, Tony Edwardson wrote:
>> You change it by editing the HTML in the git repo and once your changes
>> are committed, they get applied at the next git pull which is run
>> frequently.
>> This makes it easy to break and will become unwieldy as more and more
>> talks are added.
> I thought about this over the years.  I figured the best way to check
> for breakage would be to write tests that validate the HTML, check
> links, spot common errors, and whatever else needs doing.  These tests
> might even exist as a commit hook in the repository.
>
> My main reason for keeping static HTML was that it made the site hard
> to break:  it's much easier to break a Web application running against
> CPAN modules that might need updating than it is to break an HTTP
> server.
>
>> I want to improve this as follows :-
>>
>>   * to become a multiple page site with navigation
> The existing pages could easily be broken out into templates.
>
>>   * make it easier to add talks by simply adding a file to a directory
>>     structure and it appears on the site
> That's an interesting idea, but I wonder how you would derive the
> presentation title and speaker's name.  I never found it hard to add
> these manually.
>
>>   * Add RSS feeds from important perl sites
>>   * Add a resources and links page to useful stuff . e.g. documention,
>>     tutorials, free pdf books and the like
> How does the site benefit from duplicating things that already exist
> rather than providing information specific to the group?
>
>>   * Add a web interface to  irc
> You can do this within a static site.
>
>> I would like it to be easy to add stuff to the site via an authenticated
>> page
> If you do this, I would suggest storing changes in the site's
> repository.  I don't see what problem this solves:  anyone who might
> want to edit the site will already be comfortable with a text editor
> and version control, given the group's membership.
>
> I hope I don't put you off making the site better.  It's been
> neglected for a few years and could certainly do with improvement.
>
> I'd focus on the group specific things, perhaps giving better details
> of venue locations (GPS co-ordinates, map links), a meeting calendar
> (including an ICS link) rather than adding generic Perl information
> or writing a content management system.  But these are just my
> opinions.
>
> All the best,
> Tom
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