As someone who has made a decent number of changes to the website I think our future direction should focus on these points:
1. Ease of setup and deployment 2. Fewer moving parts (related to above) 3. Move to modern HTML, JavaScript and CSS practices (perhaps completely disallowing inline CSS and JavaScript with CSP) 4. Generate a nearly static site including comments. I can try to explain some of these at a later time but hopefully those who have worked with the site can understand why I'd want to go this way. I have ordered them roughly in my personal order of importance. To be frank for any major changes to succeed we need ordered and scheduled cooperation. These cannot be done by ad-hoc volunteering for a few hours per month. They will need a focused and scheduled approach to succeed because there are some challenging aspects: - Changing setup or deployment will affect every box in production. - We render much of the manual using PHD which is then rsync'd and thus if you are changing HTML/CSS that is related to changes in PHD you have to coordinate the releases and need to potentially support both versions simultaneously. - As with many large websites our site has more odds and ends needs that are not immediately apparent. - Much of the code is old and not well understood and there are basically no tests for it. I am happy for new people to contribute and will do the best I can to help but honestly we're in need of serious commitments if we want serious change. Otherwise we'll keep moving along as we are.
