[pygame] Announce: PygWeb2.0rc

[jug]

Hello!

We would like to announce we have finished working on the PygWeb website
that was originally intended to replace the current site on pygame.org
<http://pygame.org>. Although this caused some controversy and the
maintainer(s) of pygame.org <http://pygame.org> did not seem interested,
we kept working. We now have a fully functional website with the same
basic functions provided by the current pygame.org <http://pygame.org>
website, but also many new features:

- a *real* user system with small profile pages, statistics, privacy
settings and more

- improved project management with intelligent tagging, uploading
multiple screen shots, integrating youtube videos and a "project of the
month" poll (as replacement for "spotlight")

- a snippets section that allows users to post small, useful snippets of
source code that others may learn from or reuse. Its quite the same idea
like the pygame code repository (pcr), but easier to manage and to use.
It also supports tagging and bookmarking.

- comments on nearly every content on the website, except for
documentation and a few other pages

- lots of feeds (Atom & RSS), eg. for all new projects, new releases of
either one special project or all projects, news, project of the month, ...

- subscriptions for most content with feeds, ie. you could get a mail on
every new release of your favorite game or on pygame news

- full text search: Search in some subsections or the whole site

- consistent markup support including most common markup languages like
reStructuredText, Markdown, Textile, Creole, bbCode (its very easy to
add one) for all formatted text. All text edit fields have an preview
option.

- timezone localization, even for anonymous users (the latter needs js)

- a shiny, modern style and an option to add more styles and every user
can use the style he likes best (more styles are yet to be written)

- apis to access data programmatically: XML-RPC, for simple read
requests, and REST, for enlarged read and write requests. A small
example of use could be a "check for newer version" option in your game
or even a possibility to directly download the new version

- enclosed irc bot with some useful commands (some use the website
database) and an optional announcer feature (eg. announce news or even
new releases)

- integrated Trac that provides a wiki, bug tracer, svn browser, plugin
system (with lots of plugins out there) and more

- full admin interface with some nice and useful features to administer
the site easily

- lots of configuration settings to change specific behavior (but with
good default values)

Our site is open source and if someone would like to host it we will
support it and help in getting it setup.
We would, of course, like to see it on pygame.org <http://pygame.org>,
but that's up to the owner of pygame.org <http://pygame.org> or the
community.

The demo site sill runs at http://pygameweb.no-ip.org/ . There is
already some data from pygame.org <http://pygame.org> for seriously
testing content and also to show that we could successfully migrate
data. The irc bot can be tested in #pygame on freenode. Just write "b0t
help" to get a list of available commands.

Besides looking for a host for the site, we would like to get some more
testers and feedback. There may still be some bugs or details that could
be improved.

If you want a shiny, modern, new website representing your favorite
python game library, get in touch!
It's up to you!

Regards,

Julian and Devon

[ssteinerX]

On Nov 29, 7:32 am, jug <j...@fantasymail.de> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> We would like to announce we have finished working on the PygWeb website
> that was originally intended to replace the current site on pygame.org
> <http://pygame.org>.

I'm kind of new to PyGame but the new site looks far better than the
old one and, being in Django, would seem to be a huge step forward.

What's the issue?

Is there some reason that a better web site would not be better?

S

[Horst JENS]

Nice work, Jug !

if clicking on the "code" tab, the whol website recenter and has smaller
width (1024) than before. you may have to test with high browser
resolution

-Horst

--
Horst JENS
horst...@chello.at
http://members.chello.at/horst.jens

[Tyler Laing]

I'm only recounting what I saw and what was said, not commenting on this:

The issue is some people felt Jug and the others went ahead without proper discussion before-hand.

/me signs off.

--
Tyler Laing
Science and Tech Editor
The Phoenix Newspaper
(1) 250 863-4869

University of British Columbia - Okanagan
3333 University Way
Kelowna, BC UNC 109
Student Services Building

[sste...@gmail.com]

On Nov 29, 2009, at 12:40 PM, Tyler Laing wrote:

> I'm only recounting what I saw and what was said, not commenting on this:
>
> The issue is some people felt Jug and the others went ahead without proper discussion before-hand.

Ok, well I'd say the results speak for themselves.

I only have one question; how is updating the new site different from the old? Is the Django site still serving most things from static pages and just using the database to store comments and such, or did they use one of the little CMS doo-dads available for use with Django?

S

[Michiel Overtoom]

On 29 Nov 2009, at 13:32 , jug wrote:

> The demo site sill runs at http://pygameweb.no-ip.org/

Looks nice. I have a suggestion: If you download a code snippet, it gets named like '49.py' or '55.py'. But a filename would be more useful, like 'ZoomScreen.py' instead of '55.py'.

Greetings,

[jug]

Hey,

Thanks for the feedback.

> I have a suggestion: If you download a code snippet, it gets named like '49.py' or '55.py'. But a filename would be more useful, like 'ZoomScreen.py' instead of '55.py

Good idea, I've changed that.

> if clicking on the "code" tab, the whol website recenter and has smaller
> width (1024) than before. you may have to test with high browser
> resolution

I know that. Not yet sure whats better. The smaller, fixed width was the
original style, but sometimes its not enough space for the entire
content (logged in as admin or with very long user name).

> I only have one question; how is updating the new site different from the old? Is the Django site still serving most things from static pages and just using the database to store comments and such, or did they use one of the little CMS doo-dads available for use with Django?

The site runs with an own database. Currently its sqlite, but since its
done with Django, most other db backends should work as well. All
content except the documentation is stored in the database. It's
possible to convert data from the current pygame.org db, but you cannot
use the same data or database without converting.

> The issue is some people felt Jug and the others went ahead without
> proper discussion before-hand.

Some people wanted to rewrite the website as well, but not with Django.
The discussion got nowhere fast, so we just started (otherwise, I think
we would be still discussing). Also, those who wanted to write a website
with other tools, did not do that (afaik). The same applies to the
details. You cannot discuss every single detail on such a mailing list.
Everyone has his own opinion, but you can only implement it one way. So
we did it how we deemed it right and then showed it to the list so that
everyone could have a look at it, test it, and tell us whether it is ok
or he found any no-go's.

-- Julian

[B W]

Hi, jug.

I like the aesthetics of your redesign, and the layout is very
friendly. I'm curious to see if your conversion will fix HTML-wrapping
issues like this: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/2DVectorClass. And
whether project screenshots will be ported and the default N/A images
will be replaced.

One content-related feedback. This occurs on the following converted
"snippet" from the Pygame Code Repository.

http://pygameweb.no-ip.org/snippets/28/

The original distribution bundles files critical to the code's
function. While your converstion exposes the code for convenient
viewing--a very nice touch--it seems to have lost the other
components: an image file, and POV files if anyone should want to dig
into the 3D image with POV. I predict this would be a frustrating
discovery for anyone wishing to see the code in action.

I do not know how many are like this, but I'm sure you would want to
follow up on it, in the spirit of insuring converted content is
"either unchanged or improved". :)

Cheers.

Gumm

[Devon Scott-Tunkin]

if clicking on the "code" tab, the whol website recenter and has smaller
width (1024) than before. you may have to test with high browser
resolution

I should look into this though, sounds like the code css is overriding the other widths. I don't think he was complaining that it was too wide, Julian, just that the code section did not match the rest of the site. I can't remember right now if the code was using different templates than the rest of the site.

Thanks again for the feedback everyone,

Devon

[jug]

B W wrote:
> I like the aesthetics of your redesign, and the layout is very
> friendly.

Thanks.

> I'm curious to see if your conversion will fix HTML-wrapping
> issues like this: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/2DVectorClass. And
> whether project screenshots will be ported and the default N/A images
> will be replaced.
>

I don't see any errors there.
Since the pygame developers who run pygame.org are not interested in the
website, it will (probably) run as a individual website, independent of
pygame.org (if anyone is interested, email me). In this case, it will
not migrate any data from pygame.org.
We did not migrate screenshots for the demo cause its just a lot of data
(of course it would be possible).

> One content-related feedback. This occurs on the following converted
> "snippet" from the Pygame Code Repository.
>
> http://pygameweb.no-ip.org/snippets/28/
>
> The original distribution bundles files critical to the code's
> function. While your converstion exposes the code for convenient
> viewing--a very nice touch--it seems to have lost the other
> components: an image file, and POV files if anyone should want to dig
> into the 3D image with POV. I predict this would be a frustrating
> discovery for anyone wishing to see the code in action.
>
> I do not know how many are like this, but I'm sure you would want to
> follow up on it, in the spirit of insuring converted content is
> "either unchanged or improved". :)
>

There are a few snippets that have additional data like images or extra
files with it. Normally, Snippets (on pygWeb) are just code and maybe
some explanatory text. Thus, migrating additional files it not possible
(when using a converter script). Of course these extra data may be
important. Not for the demo, but for a productive usage. The problem is,
that there is no option for normal users to attach any files to snippets
(which is, I think, basically appropriate). So these snippets either
have to work without additional data or host this data somewhere else
and link to it or use the wiki that allows attachments (but is not meant
for code hosting).

Devon Scott-Tunkin wrote:
> I can't remember right now if the code was using different templates
> than the rest of the site.

Yes, the "code" tab is the one handled by Trac (with its own templates
and style sheets).

-- Julian

[Devon Scott-Tunkin]

Yes, the "code" tab is the one handled by Trac (with its own templates and style sheets).

 

Okay, then I probably just forgot to update the trac one when I changed the django one, I'll fix that. It would be so nice if I could figure out how they could use the same style sheets...

Devon

[sste...@gmail.com]

On Dec 7, 2009, at 12:49 PM, Devon Scott-Tunkin wrote:

Yes, the "code" tab is the one handled by Trac (with its own templates and style sheets).

 

Okay, then I probably just forgot to update the trac one when I changed the django one, I'll fix that. It would be so nice if I could figure out how they could use the same style sheets...

Did you try sticking the Django site style into the Trac code after the Trac CSS?

Trac has a few of its own specific classes and such that won't be overridden by the Django one, but having the Django one last should bring many things in the Trac site in line pretty quick.

S