The TechRepublic article about ROS points to https://www.ros.org/contributors/ . The page says it is autogenerated and Last update: Mon Jul 14 11:47:31 2014.
Open Robotics is aware that most of ros.org is getting a bit stale. We are presently putting together a plan to do a major update to ros.org in the not to distant future.
As part of this process I would really like to know what people find valuable on ros.org. To be honest I don’t think I’ve ever looked at this page in particular. Is this something that you find valuable?
Well, usually I just use the few links to wiki etc. if I’m lazy to type the whole address of wiki or so… I imagine it could serve mainly as a landing page for people who don’t know (yet) much about ROS…
That’s basically what we aiming for; a user’s first interaction with ROS and getting them routed to the most appropriate resource.
As it stands I am trying to find an alternative to wordpress that allows the community to directly suggest edits. I am leaning towards using something like Jekyll. Do you have any thoughts on this?
A static site like Jekyll generated from md files in github is a great idea. Bolting any sort of dynamic behavior onto that is challenging, but I’m not sure you need anything like that.
The only place where I could see Jekyll being a problem is for something like robots.ros.org where we give the community a place to list their products/works. In my mind if we use a regular pattern for the robots I think we could get away with something like 500-1000 entries until we would really need something with a legitimate database behind it (we could probably get away with some sort of CSV to MD script). At that point I could be talked into standing up a small Django server.
The take home is that we are aware that ros.org needs some love and we’re on it. Hopefully by late next week we should have a sketch of plan for the community to review.
The way the docs in the new ROS index work is great, in my opinion. Any random page has a link to edit it on GitHub which leverages GitHub’s online editing and PR workflow. This allows anyone to propose a change to a page while also allowing anyone to review them and to track changes. It’s a fairly common pattern these days in the general open source community, too.