## The website The goal is to get a working site up while doing as little work as possible ourselves. ### Prelude (Copied from Discourse) Just to reorient ourselves: the reason why I wanted to go with rails because I don't want to write the entire stack myself - there should be pieces that already exist (like an events & calendar system) that we can just plug in. I'm not married to rails, but I want to see if we can do that with rails before we explore other options. So in this case, I'm prioritizing "getting it done" over having cool tech :P s/rails/django/g if we decide to go with Django instead. Of course, we can reimplement this stuff in a "fun" way after we get it working. I've just been a part of too many "let's do boring activity X in fun technology Y" projects that never got finished because X is _still_ boring, even if you're doing X in Haskell. So I think we should take the pragmatic approach here. ### What we need - An events/calendar system (a wiki page may be sufficient for this) - A blog/newsfeed (static blog using Discourse threads for comments could work ok) ### A possible solution Switch to Django (from Rails) and use the web app powering [lug.ncsu.edu](http://lug.ncsu.edu/) ([source](https://github.com/ncsulug/ncsulug-website)) as a starting point for building our main website (the front page). **Pros:** The following will instantly be available to us: - decent looking website designed for a similar cause - blog module - simple built-in wiki module (consistent looks) ([demo](http://lug.ncsu.edu/wiki/Home/)) - more focused code base, probably easier to hack on than the current ones in use - easier deploys: just Python+database+django modules vs. Ruby(main) + Haskell(wiki). Though discourse still needs ruby and docker. **Cons:** - a bit of work to transfer the content of the current wiki (gitit based) to the new Django app - not worth it **if** only done because of one single component (e.g. wiki) (not the case, since we'll be building our events/calendar system into the web app) - Not clear that we really need an event/calendar app (described as a meetup.com copy on irc) given the very small number of events we'll have to track. We can use a wiki page instead: scroll down to the upcoming events section on <https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell> to see an example of this. ### Ongoing discussion There's an ongoing discussion about other possibilities such as: - Using static pages for the main website - Using static page generators - Using org-mode for the front page ([demo](http://emacsconf.github.io/emacsconf2015/) and [source](http://git.emacsconf2015.org/emacsconf/emacsconf2015)) Please check out <http://discourse.emacsconf2015.org/t/reconsidering-our-stack/54> and feel free to add them here