 I'd like to welcome everyone that managed to get up that early after the cheese and wine party. Welcome to the talk from the website team. It's just me on the stage, but I will show you the people that are involved a bit later. I started back in 2000, 2001, and got involved in the German translation part. And since about two years, I'm a part of the webmaster team. The history of the website is a rather longish one. We had 13 years, the same website design with just minor tweaks, like the blueish logo or picture was just added some years ago, but it was more or less the same website design for well over 13 years, which is an extremely long time. A lot of people mailed us about having a redesigned on suggestions, but no one really actually made it happen. Most of the times there were accessibility issues involved. Some people wanted to push for JavaScript and things like that, which not really work for accessible devices. And yeah, people turned away because they wanted to get flesh on there and things moving and blinking and what else, but we have very strong requirements with respect to accessibility. We have blind users. We want to also support people who are handicapped vision. And also the translation is a very big part requirement issue. So it took 13 years to get a new web design online. This is the current new look of the website. We managed to get it done for the release of squeeze, but not only for the website, also for Planet TV and org for the wiki and some other systems, and this was a huge effort which took us at least two years of hard work, more or less hard work. There were a lot of people involved in getting this done. And yeah, we thought it didn't manage just to redesign the website once this year. We also did it a second time, thought that was only for a single day. I want to mention the people who are involved in the website team. Runa Sandvik started the ISC channel some years ago. She wanted to participate in Google some of code. Unfortunately, the project wasn't approved, but she stayed involved for a longer time. And I specifically want to mention the ISC channel because it's one of the most important resources these days, which managed to get the web team more active and more involved and in better contact with each other. It didn't work that well through the mailing list before, but the ISC channel is a very, very important resource for the current web team. Kalle Soderman did propose the new design. He worked on it for several years before it got really known and people started to give it a try. We didn't only work for getting it working for the main website, but also for the wiki and that was the reason that made me get interested in his approach and tried and that was the point two years ago where I started to fire up some test sites where we can get his patches applied and get it working and so that people can look at it and that we actually have a chance to work on problems that might appear before we roll it out to our real websites. Also Martin Sover-Hellers did put up one or two test sites, so it wasn't only me who did put up test sites, and there are several people who really did invest a lot of work here which I want to mention. I did mention them alphabetically. I don't want to put them in a specific order. Kalle is a longstanding translator and he's one of the first non-uploading Debian developers that we have. He invested, I can't really remember. We looked it up and he started working on translation after I got involved, but to me it felt like he was there all the time that I got involved in Debian, so it was just about time that he gets the appreciation and was becoming a Debian developer too. Please stand up. So the Danish translation of the website is almost completely just his work and since he became a Debian developer, he's now also part of the webmaster team. Madame Sue is working on the Italian translation. She is also very active in publicity work and Debian women and she does hell a lot of her work and the redesign wouldn't have been possible without Francesca's great work, so thank you. Simon Pella was also quite a lot involved, unfortunately he isn't here, he was at some other event and didn't want to travel yet again shortly after that. He did a lot of work also in that respect and is still very active within the webmaster team. Then there is Tafit, our French contributor from Martinique and he really invested also a lot of not only translation work and not only webmaster stuff but also cleaning up things all across the system. We have regular validation runs and tidy runs which check the HTML code and link links to external sites and he does a lot of cleaning up in that area too together with Francesca and he also is part of the webmaster team nowadays. I have put this into two groups, the first group are all part of the webmaster team, the second groups are not part of the webmaster team but also did a lot of work in that respect. UF, I'm not sure what his real name is, okay, thanks, Damian, Synergy, Ben Armstrong and Sover from with his DSA head on helped a lot and yes, these were more or less the people that made the redesign actually happen, who helped us along this path to get it working. I also have to mention Josip Rodin who is a long standing webmaster and allowed me to become a webmaster in the first place so a lot of thanks to him too. Yeah, I mentioned it before, the website is translated in well over 13 different languages. We have over 5,000 translatable pages, there are almost 100,000 commits through into the CVS system and the versioned history of the website goes back to July 1998, which is an extremely long history, there are not very many projects that go that far back, the kernel of course but lots of other projects don't are not that huge in size. We had this meeting last year in December in Vienna where we managed to get things prepared for the redesign. Unfortunately Francesca and Simon were not able to attend due to timing issues but this was a very productive and useful meeting to get things working. The second person on the right is Karle Södermann which did suggest the design and did most of the work which just put it into place and yes, I always welcome people get more involved in the website team, I would suggest you to get involved either on IOC on our mailing list, there are some complaints that usually come up, one of them is it's CVS, no one uses CVS nowadays, well it's not true we use it and it works extremely well for us and we don't see a real technically reason to move away from CVS, that doesn't mean that we are objecting to moving away from CVS but the options usually also have the problems like moving to SVN makes it really difficult for some areas to do commits over different trees when you don't have a full checkout, SVN obviously supports partial checkout which might be very useful so actually and it of course offers offline diffing which don't require server access which would be a quite nice addition but someone has to invest the work for Git it might be more a bit of a problem because subdirectory checkout is not supported in Git and the complete web tree is rather huge and if you have to transfer the complete history to your local system it might get troublesome for some translators who are not that well connected like most of us so this might be a problem when people try to move to Git but none of these are really hard objections there's just no one really willing to do the work and the people that usually complain about that we still use CVS are not willing to help out with getting it converted to some other version control system the second next complain is rather similar but it's using WML no one uses WML these days and it's it's not developed anymore yeah it's yeah that's one of the things that people claim there's not much of progress or development going on but it's still in maintenance state so yeah it works well for us and all the sort of modern CMS systems usually have also their merits especially with respect to translation work they often don't offer diff tools for getting things translated or if they do it's it's flaky and the result is put into place with a complete other way of content they don't support content negotiation which we use for translated pages but use some other system with where you have to more or less translate every single page otherwise you will get switched to English and be stuck with English when you browse from there and things like that so there's still no hard objection in that direction but it needs people to invest some efforts to get it working and yes wait for the microphone please and please stand up and say your name for the people on the stream mostly so hi yeah it works i'm max lebecker debian packageer for the wml stuff thank you my question is do we still have web mirrors because i think that was the hard objection against and anything dynamical we do still have web mirrors but all the web mirrors are on debian org machines so we are able to do whatever we want on them these days they are not mirrored through uh two boxes that we don't can uh change anything on them so currently we do have boxes all the all everything that is behind w3 uh debian org is is administrated by dsa and we can get changes done there there will be some talk in the buff later uh i'm i will be mentioning all the tracks that will be coming up which are related to web services um and we can talk there about these things maybe it will be covered by sobel in his talk so yes that's more or less the standing where we are we want to get more people involved we have a lot of active members within the webmaster team these days so we want to get more things back onto the website some things over the years uh got put into the wiki which more or less should belong on the website mostly for translation purposes but for making it more official um we will be working on improving navigation and some moving some parts around we are always welcoming input in that respect um so please get involved um with changing the website to a new design you more or less might have found out that the web team is still there or rather is again there and very active and get things done so please don't try to do things outside the web team come here get involved and help us out um like mentioned um there will be more tracks uh more talks in this track at three there will be tracking website users which is a tough topic that we understand um and this buff is about how to address the social and technical limitations like preserving privacy and everything that goes with it at four o'clock there will be the publicity buff at five uh i give a talk about backport improvements that we want to get applied um backports is an official service these days but it is still lacking in some areas and this buff is meant to address those to list them and to be able to work on them and then at six there will be the deviant wiki buff which is about the wiki itself all of the uh other talks within or buffs within this track will not happen this big auditorium but in the small round room um if you come into the venue on the main entrance go to the right to the round room yes so are there any questions you are always wanted to ask the web team but never dared to yes um i think to make the website a bit more attractive some more i'll not say dynamic content but um more changes of the content of the main site what might attract some more users nowadays we only have the debian news rss feed um topics there the rest of the content just is stale uh yes that's a very valid uh comment um we sort of should have get more uh we should have tried to maybe get the debconf more present on the website and we also have something like um debian project news so we could have an abstract on the on the top and then just a read more button which redirects to the to the debian project news website or or link to the identica page or um people behind debian this weekend debian are i think great things which could be the upcoming block debian orc sing yes um toughest can you note these things down please so it doesn't it doesn't get lost i mean it's on the stream but on goby debian or on irc um just note it down and we will put it together just give the microphone around hello um christian perrier i never i think i never did website translation in french so yeah sorry and i would like to ask you uh is has there been some work uh to use get text based translation for the website instead of w ml of course you tell me that it's a good improvement and it needs someone to do the work um well there are there is get text used for some parts like the navigation uh things and common parts which are used uh in in in some areas uh using get text for the whole website of course it would need someone to do it uh on the other hand i'm not that certain if uh there's the thing with get text like fuzzy translations and and that the thing would be what to do with them present the english an english paragraph within a french page um might work but uh for things like eggy a swedish page and someone who would prefer norwegian to english um would get an english paragraph within the swedish page if it's not translated and i'm not that totally convinced that this would be a step forward and would improve the thing so it's more or less a tricky issue which should be discussed or properly what to do with fuzzy paragraphs and if that is decided we might give it a try for maybe some some small sub directory see how it works out there and move on from that point i think my my main point was of course not to on technical value of this or that mostly to lower the entry barrier to work on translation uh for the website i feel like it the use of w ml makes it a little bit difficult for more difficult for people who want to get involved than just using p o files that's just a feeling of mine you know um well it's yeah historical perspective i see i think the challenges that the website is facing today are basically the same ones that it was facing 10 years ago and in more in general uh with the social whole issue what about the news what about what's happening now and what about the updated stuff uh it's the same challenge that the mailing lists have uh and have had uh 10 or 15 years ago uh things are happening on the front uh that's the public website public wiki public whatever and then there's things happening in the on at the back end uh but we require the users to delve into the back end to figure out what's new and what's updated and similarly uh we show people uh various languages and various you know we enable content negotiation when nobody did that and we have all these cool useful things but to actually edit them you have to delve into the back back end and learn how to use cvs and everything and uh it was interesting that always the user oriented user concentrated side of debian and the developer concentrated oriented side of debian conflict in this area uh notice how uh the common issues are why do we use cvs all of us know about the technical in in the uh deficiencies of cvs but um switching to a more advanced system this uh without a layer of user friendliness uh detracts from the basic goal and the basic goal is still serve the users and the web user is the most simplest form of user that we have sorry sorry that's that offends anyone but that's true uh why the internet is popular because the web is making things simple and uh so this is the the the same basically the same conundrum is always in place how to make things that are complicated how to make them more simple uh everything is basically the same idea and uh well obviously we are failing because everything would be like facebook if it were successful you know everybody would be using our website and uh seeing all the translations helping translate everything so uh but uh to answer the question uh about christians questions why don't we use one complicated technology over one another because nobody can really demonstrate uh the that the technical advantage or the user advantage of get text is so high that it would be worth spending time on it to implement it in the back end and then in the front end I think that's the answer because that's usually the answer to every question that we have yeah for me as a translator working on a p o file is not much more convenient than working on a file that I can create a diff from and see you know what files are yes of course you see you see the problem yeah we want uh people to translate without knowing that it goes into a file or in a database or in a I don't know what and I'm afraid you're not the average translator on that that's also very true yes do you have a wish list for a new cms to switch to um for features probably nothing that uh cms that is able to generate static pages and doesn't require php in the back end that's more or less the without losing all the translation we currently have because I think the php back end might get tricky to convince dsa to make it work but it really has to be I think they could become convinced but that would really mean uh that that we are moving forward and that it gets things better for for for the users in the end more questions no more questions maybe my opinion is biased too but uh I think that um change uh we WML is quite okay for the website if the problem is that is not um how to say um easy enough for for people to to enter it then maybe I think that it it would be um um um better use of our efforts to um help people understanding it such as doing what I've been done sometimes as IRC training sessions or a training session on some other channel or um uh trying to uh spend the energy is energies into into um learning people uh into helping people um switching to another cms to another um management system um I think it would require many many energies more than and would have um less uh results than trying to help people understanding it I just want to point out um again that the the things we mentioned are not a hard rejection and that we are open for discussions things just because we have an opinion and just because we are the webmasters doesn't mean we don't listen to reasoning so if you are able to come up with something convincing don't feel shy you you're allowed to have your own opinion yeah I just want to comment uh people sometimes don't realize what really is uh in our advanced what is advanced in our WML setup uh we have a system that uh allows all the translators to define how dates for example are printed on the on every page uh on debian that uses dates so for example uh the 6th of May 2011 uh the formatting of this string is common along uh everywhere on the on the website so uh typically a cms uh a typical cms software today advertises oh we make things easy to edit but uh a typical cms does not make uh make it easy to edit metadata such as this it doesn't make it really easy to um track history of things so you really need something really advanced to to to compete with WML that that's the problem I think more questions um someone suggested obviously icky wicky and it's quite popular these days actually it might work I haven't picked myself into it and if someone is willing to take a closer look I think icky wicky might be uh step forward here it depends on uh if there's still possible to just check out your own language in English um which might be troublesome doing it with gits uh but should be possible with sub modules which I personally know nothing about I just heard that it might be the way to go um but I'm doing things on the web and potentially offering some we we really need uh to offer people to just fetch the file on the web potentially just in the footer adding a link the source to this file translation for this file and going from there might might get more people involved in that area I actually just have a more comment no question it's just a very positive thing I just wanted to mention that I'm very happy that you are mentioning accessibility on your own so there is actually no need for the accessibility team to um to do anything in the website area uh because the site is just perfectly accessible since like eight years uh or since I started to use it so uh just wanted to say that's really great how it is from an accessibility standpoint it worked thank you I was just about I was just about asking that um question um is um when we switched to the new layout did anything chain uh did anything get worse for you or get got better no I didn't uh I didn't see any degradation so yes that was also one of the reasons why I got quite convinced that Carlos approach is a good one because I noticed that he spent a lot of time also on accessibility thoughts how to potentially also improve navigation and things like that so he really put a lot of work into it it's just great from my standpoint to see that people are thinking about these issues on their own so there's absolutely no need for me to I think we did some but we would still like to welcome you on the team yeah I'm subscribed and that's commit success but there was absolutely no need to do anything I think we did some last minute color adjustments um for the red green or lines I think yes I think that there was some issues with red green color blinds which which got a bit adapted in the in the last minutes before coming up with a new layout so if if we have persons with color blindness in here help us um to to get the colors better for you anyone in here yep any more questions no more no more questions and then enjoy the lunch