Site News Section

[saratoga]

The front page has a table of news items, but they're each only 1 sentence long, and say very little about the project.

Something more like other open source projects do would be nice:

http://xbmc.org/
http://ktorrent.org/

(Although maybe just linked from the front page rather then replacing it.)  That way users and non-core developers can keep up with XBMC development without having to troll through SVN logs.  I think adding something like this would make our project a lot more accessible to casual users and prospective developers alike.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the content management, blogging, or whatever software people use for things like this.  How difficult would something like this be to setup?  Is there good free software to do it with?

[AlexP]

Good plan

[BdN3504]

it's pretty basic php. if you really want something like that, i suggest you look into joomla. If that's not techie enough for you, typo3 is the way to go. There's a lot of documentation and big communities for both of these. Both are open source.
Easiest route is to download a vm which already includes one of the two and just put that on a server. Example: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/joomla

[JdGordon]

I'm in two minds about this.
If its not updated enough then it really will give people the impression that the rest of the site is outdated (we get enough "is X supported? its not on the list but i think thats out dated").
But if its updated too often it just becomes noise (thats not realy a bad thing though)..

Also, who will post news? and what would constitute news?

[saratoga]

I'm in two minds about this.
If its not updated enough then it really will give people the impression that the rest of the site is outdated (we get enough "is X supported? its not on the list but i think thats out dated").
But if its updated too often it just becomes noise (thats not realy a bad thing though)..

I don't really think you can update too often.  At worst people just don't read every update.  At best, it keeps people interested and informed.  I personally enjoy seeing updates XBMC on my google reader as they let me know about new features and skins for my media box.

Also, who will post news? and what would constitute news?

I asked Bagder and he suggested just giving everyone who wanted an account access.  Which seems sensible to me.

I assume we'd just put things like new releases, feature freezes, new ports and major new features going into SVN (e.g. the playlist viewer stuff you worked on seems like it would be interesting).