In 2009 I started implementing the website layout. We even had a plan to launch a beta together with GNOME 2.28. But without enough people with knowledge in Plone and lacking time from everywhere to do such a work, we got stuck and never released anything.

During last Guadec I decided to spend some time on it, and after the conference I wrote in my blog about the work I began on implementing the website on top of WordPress. By the time I didn’t know this consideration Federico wrote in 2006, that makes a lot of sense right now:

Lessons from the Past
Our web maintainers become overworked and eventually disappear. The web page becomes stale because then there is no one who understands the previous CMS.
– Federico Mena Quintero

WordPress, being simple to use and being a well known tool for lots of people inside GNOME, was agreed to fully replace Plone after Lincoln and I wrote a plugin to integrate the website content with GNOME translation infrastructure.

(we had tested this WPML plugin (which was open source at the time) before developing our own, but while it offered localization support, it couldn’t integrate the translation system with Damned Lies and all the existing GNOME infrastructure for that)

The plugin basically fetches all the website content in a big XML file, and uses xml2po from gnome-doc-utils to do the magic. Later we get the translated content and put it back with the HTML of the pages.

So, after a while (and a bit more), we are a few days from 3.0 release. And we’ve got a plan to do the switch on April 6^th. The idea is to release the basic website and later add all the planned features. We have the website ready software-wise, and the content and design of pages are getting there (Allan, Andreas and a few others arrived at Bangalore and will try to cover the missing parts of this too).

Stay tuned!

Besides the talks and discussions (and the tripping around the island!), most of the time the GNOME Art team spent was in the hacking rooms, working on icon drawings, user interfaces mockups, new ideas for streamlining the desktop and coding the new website layout.

As a work in progress, some changes in the website design appeared while I was putting the new content in the layout (and this still needs to be finished!). The original one Lucas Rocha announced is becoming this (feedback is welcome!):

The plan is to release the beta website together with GNOME 2.28. For this, a lot of work needs to be done, including all the teams — content, design and CMS. We got a bit late in the schedule, but we can still get everything ready in time.

If you want to make history and help the GNOME website development, subscribe the marketing list (for the content and design areas) and the web mailing list for the plone implementation and introduce yourself .