Perl echosystems - websites an overview

[Leo Lapworth]

Hi,

Just to clarify a few things... it's taken me years to get changes made to

many of the Perl sites, hopefully you'll see why... and why I don't blame those with control, even if I don't like it.

Firstly - many of these sites have been run for many years by a few dedicated people, you have to realise how much historical work has gone into them and how some people feel about yet another group of people coming along saying it all needs to change... and then disappearing again 6 months later, leaving something that is hard to maintain. I'm just saying how it is - not making or looking for opinion.

Perl.com is owned by Tom Christiansen but TPF licences it from him under specific rules (must have both his personal advert and other adverts to bring in money, most of which TPF gets, but some of which Tom gets) It is running on MT. TPF pays Chromatic to look after getting articles for it, although Chromatic was open to changes recently - these will always require the adverts to be there (I've asked for alternatives several times and always been told this will not change) which has always stopped me doing something more.

*.Perl.org is owned and run by Ask and Robert. I managed to get commit and did/do a lot of work on the site but still have to get it signed off by them first. It is now in a public repo https://github.com/perlorg/perlweb - changes can and do happen but the key is it has to be maintainable (content that doesn't go out of date easily) and and design suggests you have to approach on more than 'this looks cool'.

jobs.perl.org - something specific that Ask runs though he's taken patches from people - I don't know the details but it's not in the main repo.

Use.perl.org - Frozen, I tried getting the content just after but it took too long to be worth resurrecting (users having now left) Leon did a lot of work and made https://metacpan.org/module/WWW::UsePerl::Server and the data is now at :

https://s3.amazonaws.com/useperl/useperl-2012-04-29.sql.bz2

www.pm.org I helped convert to git and get it redesigned, Jay Hannah runs it, I think on behalf of TPF, I think he he's just left to get on with it, the site is hosted (as with so much by Ask and Robert), the repo is here: https://github.com/perlorg/www.pm.org

www.cpan.org bits of this are https://github.com/perlorg/cpanorg and

other parts are in pause https://github.com/andk/pause - Ask looks after

this mostly with the other CPAN admins, I did the redesign and some copy editing - although more is needed. (see also https://github.com/devel/cpanorg-generators )

perldoc.perl.org is still officially run by JJ, https://github.com/jonallen/perldoc.perl.org - but I've not been able to

contact him for a while (not tried _that_ hard), the site is hosted by Ask and Robert, but they just run the content.

faq.perl.org - I got redirected to http://learn.perl.org/faq/ and I now run the perlfaq ( officially from https://github.com/tpf/perlfaq - but I encourage pulls to https://github.com/perl-doc-cats/perlfaq as many people have access to merge / review and I just do a release every so often ).

perlsphere.net - I took it over when the last owner didn't want it any more - about 3 years ago - https://github.com/ranguard/perlsphere

blogs.perl.org - Dave Cross and Aaron Crane got this going with the MT guys after use.perl.org died - unfortunately it's MT (which is great that it's Perl, but sucks as no one knows how to maintain it - or volunteered and then didn't have time and the MT team haven't been able to donate any more sysadmin time) https://github.com/blogs-perl-org/ (for the bits that are not tied into MT) - but it ticks over now.

Perlnews.org - I run this with Dave Cross - it now feeds perl.org home page (after over a year of proving there was some regular content) - but would be nice to have more stories. This site came about because there , as no single place to announce big perl stuff once use.perl.org got frozen. (you'll notice it's not MT!)

perl-tutorial.org - wchristian and others wanted to fix that google's first page for perl tutorials were massively out of date, both the wiki code and wiki contents are in perl-doc-cats

https://github.com/perl-doc-cats/ - somewhere I've been trying to centralise people's Perl related content and sites (and forking other useful repo's to - just so they are easier to find, which I split into https://github.com/organizations/PerlProjectRepos - with the potential to move things out of the oddly titled 'perl-doc-cats'!

PerlMonks - I never used the site so didn't feel able to make suggestions, I think I'd also want such an overhall it would be a major undertaking.

Perl101.org - owned by Andy Leicester - see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/perl101-talk / https://github.com/petdance/perl101 for an example of lots of people saying they want to do stuff, but not actually getting around to it.

MetaCPAN.org has a variety of projects and is quite active, I recently managed to get the http://prepan.org/ guys to share the same repo - https://github.com/CPAN-API

There are of course other sites http://perl-begin.org/ http://perlmaven.com/ and new ones being suggested http://blogs.perl.org/users/neilb/2013/03/idea-perl-community-homepage.html - I was going to help Neil - but he's now looking at reviewing Perl frameworks before starting - so I'm not holding my breath (he does great reviews - I've managed to get some to https://github.com/perl-doc-cats/cpan-module-reviews - but not sure it's being maintained now).

So now I'm here I'm not really sure of the point of this post, other than to maybe help others understand how things are. I'd like some of it to be different, but it's not, people are people I guess, even getting hold of the existing TPF's official site is proving to be hard! - I do feel perl sites have become more open (see the github links above) and with a lot of work are better than they were - but there is a lot of room for improvement...

The flip side is that many people suggest a redesign when they don't know the content - and much of that content could do with improving! - this is something that people CAN help with and is easy to get updated in the various sites listed above (just send a pull request, if you have problems then email me and I'll see what I can do).

So I suppose if there is any message here it is please contribute to the content first and formost - the markup/server architecture/framework/and even design are second to having something that 1) works and 2) has something useful... Useful for who and how is saved for a different discussion! [ hint: we don't have enough (any?) new Perl programmers].

All the best

Leo

[Dave Cross]

On 30 June 2013 21:54, Leo Lapworth <l...@cuckoo.org> wrote:

Hi,

Just to clarify a few things... it's taken me years to get changes made to

many of the Perl sites, hopefully you'll see why... and why I don't blame those with control, even if I don't like it.

Excellent list. Thanks for doing this Leo. It's pretty much what I've just asked for - but written twelve hours before I asked for it :-)

There are a couple of things missing. Does anyone have the hosting and/or access details for perlfoundation.org and news.perlfoundation.org?

And does anyone mind if I clean this up a bit and stick it github somewhere? Do we have a repo?

Dave...

--
Dave Cross :: da...@dave.org.uk
http://dave.org.uk/
@davorg

[Leo Lapworth]

Hi Dave,

On 1 July 2013 11:19, Dave Cross <dav...@gmail.com> wrote:

On 30 June 2013 21:54, Leo Lapworth <l...@cuckoo.org> wrote:

Just to clarify a few things... it's taken me years to get changes made to

many of the Perl sites, hopefully you'll see why... and why I don't blame those with control, even if I don't like it.

Excellent list. Thanks for doing this Leo. It's pretty much what I've just asked for - but written twelve hours before I asked for it :-)

Thanks

 

There are a couple of things missing. Does anyone have the hosting and/or access details for perlfoundation.org and news.perlfoundation.org?

And does anyone mind if I clean this up a bit and stick it github somewhere? Do we have a repo?

Sure - I've created (and given you access to):

https://github.com/tpf/docs - it doesn't really fit anywhere else

Cheers

Leo

[Karen Pauley]

Hi Dave,

On 1 July 2013 19:19, Dave Cross <dav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> There are a couple of things missing. Does anyone have the hosting and/or
> access details for perlfoundation.org and news.perlfoundation.org?

news.perlfoundation.org is hosted and maintained by Ask and Robert. I
believe that the current templates for the site were created by JJ.

www.perlfoundation.org is hosted on Rackspace and the only person with
access is Casey West. (We are trying to change that.)

All the best,

Karen