[Nut-upsuser] About the new NUT website and the documentation rewrite project

[Arnaud Quette]

Dear all,

I've released a first "beta" version of the rewritten website using
the MoinMoin wiki (as a CMS).
It's available here: http://test.networkupstools.org/

This way, the website is cuter, cleaner and more manageable.
It will also allows to offer more services, and to share some more
power for the website content, and software releases.

It will most of all allows us to consolidate NUT information,
available in the website or the doc.
Currently, these info are either redundant, or missing on one side or another.
The final aim of this system is to allow us to merge these info on the
website, and generate the HTML Manuals (User and Developer) from it.

Why it's beta: simply because it's not yet complete.
I've validated that MoinMoin meets all our needs (both functional and
technical), and that we can for example generate the Compatibility
table, port the various big docs (like the protocol ones) easily and
have at least the same feature level.

Most of the basics are ported, apart from formatting details ; The
remaining points are the:
- the protocol section,
- the documentation rewrite,
- the RSS feed for the News section,
- the Acknowledgements section,
- some infrastructure base to allow the doc creation.

Why MoinMoin: because:
- it's a mainstream Free Software (GPL),
- it is simple to deploy and manage,
- it's a standard, widely available, well managed and active,
- it's already used by majors projects and huge/complex website,
- it offers easy online edition (both in textual and graphical mode),
using the ReStructured Text format (the format we decided to use for
the doc), and avoiding the need of an external tool. This will open
documentation contributions to non technical people.
- it meets our needs, in terms of moderation (only some users will be
able to edit the content), graphical look, ...
- it offers many plugins and entry points to extend its features
according to our needs,
- it allows dumping (static HTML or docbook) to extract the
documentation for distribution.
- it provides a central point for managing the website, through
CSS+MoinMoin theme (I've developed a specific one for NUT), and
central page (for menu).

I've not yet opened the system to contribution, but will soon through
mail invitation.
If you are interested in helping, please tell me so.

Feedback and comments are very welcome.

Cheers,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - MGE Office Protection Systems - http://www.mgeops.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://people.debian.org/~aquette/
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/