Good evening everyone! I am most glad to announce that thanks to the work I've been putting into the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script lately, I was able to recover our old web site back from the dead as a natural progression to the former, as you may have seen from my recent commit r28303. The result is posted at my web server, http://apollo.homeunix.net/macports, reflecting the state of the current trunk/www dir in svn at any moment. Nevertheless, what you'll see there is no more than the bringing up to speed of the old content with current information, but it is otherwise the same site we used to have back in OpenDarwin days (the "not yet" part of this message's title, unfortunately). While at it I also restructured the sources a bit, moving files here and there to have a cleaner layout, only editing the English pages and moving all other languages into a 'localized' dir, though. The really important part, however, is the revival of the ports.php page, which many users have been craving for ever since we moved to Mac OS Forge. I'm feeding this page with live information off our ports tree by running the PortIndex2MySQL.tcl script locally, though not automated yet (so lag is to be expected). Surely many things will seem broken (links maybe --surely for any language other than English--) and/or outdated, certainly including the now aging visual & structural design. Kevin Van Vechten assured me we could host the ports.php page and new guide on Mac OS Forge servers, but I'm more than sure that only from looking at the site it'll be quite obvious that we need a new and revamped design, short of a complete overhaul. In a nutshell, the purpose of this message is to call for a discussion on what we should do with our web site, which is in desperate need of some love, blood and new air. I'm even thinking about calling for an open contest so that anyone can submit new designs and logos for the project to adapt, extending the invitation to our entire user base: users mailing list, irc channel, wordpress post, wiki page, maybe even inviting WebKit people --who naturally have a thing for designing beautiful websites-- and who knows what else... something akin to NetBSD's logo redesign contest some years ago. Even though the rules for such contest would have to be very clearly defined and the entire process might be somewhat involved, I have to admit I'm developing quite a strong inclination for this approach; if anything, it'll surely help spice up interest and involvement with the project from our user base. So to sum up, it would be great to define a roadmap for a revamped web presence before devoting any more energy to what we currently have. Please don't be shy to post your opinions so that we can all start working toward finding the resources we need to make this happen. I am more than happy to lead this effort both in planning and coordination, but one mandatory requirement before moving forward is knowing if I'll have anything to lead ;-) Regards,... -jmpp