Arabeyes New Website Prototype

This is the documentation page for the first of the two phases of revamping the Arabeyes website, per Arabeyes meeting on Sunday 03 August 2008 on freenode IRC.

We will put here all information indexed historically in an ascending fashion (from old milestones on the top of the page to new ones downwards).

Only news of actual milestones allowed on this page. Ideas and opinions to be put with signature (by typing "~" four times at the end of your post) on the discussion page.

هذه هي صفحة توثيق عمل فريق إنشاء الموقع الجديد لعربايز - المرحلة التجريبية، بناءا على ما تم في اجتماع المشاركين من أعضاء مجموعة عربايز يوم الأحد 3 أغسطس 2008 على الآي آر سي - فري نوود.

سيتم فهرسة جميع المعلومات هنا تاريخيا بترتيب تصاعدي (أي من أقدم الأحداث والتي يتم ذكرها أعلى الصفحة نزولا إلى أحدثها).

يسمح بذكر وقائع الأحداث الفعلية فقط على هذه الصفحة، بينما توضع الأفكار والآراء موقّعةً (بإدخال علامة المدّ "~" أربع مرات في نهاية مداخلتك) Mfarag 23:51، 6 أغسطس 2008 (UTC)

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New Arabeyes Website Team

Team by task:

• Project Manager/ Coordinator:
  • Mohamed Farag
• Sys Admins:
  • Prototype Phase:
    • Ossama Khayat [Joined 10 Aug with working 5.9 install]
    • Mohamed Farag
    • Abderrahim Kitouni
  • Final Phase:
    • Mohamed Adnan
    • Youssef Chahibi
• Arabic Support, Localization:
  • Mohamed Sameer [Resigned 10 Aug to be adviser only]
  • Daif Al-Otaibi
• CMS Programming/ Coding as a whole:
  • Mohamed Sameer
  • Daif Al-Otaibi
  • Abderrahim Kitouni
• Themes, Graphics, Styles, Layout, Web Design:
  • Mohamed Farag
  • Abderrahim Kitouni
  • Youssef Chahibi [Joined 10 Aug]
• Documentation/ Wiki Maintenance:
  • Mohamed Farag
  • Abderrahim Kitouni [Joined 10 Aug]

Decision on system standards ad selection:

Evaluation and selection of the new Arabeyes website's CMS

Based on Arabeyes' 3 August 2008 meeting and mailing list members' input, a number of functions and features have been agreed by most members upon as required in the CMS (Content Management system) of choice. These capabilities are:

• Personal page profiles.
• News module.
• Download library.
• Revision Control System (i.e.: Subversion, CVS, etc.)
• Multilingual support.
• Role-based access control.

Discuss [1]

Criteria for CMS selection:

Conclusion on best-Arabized CMSs

Here is a brief conclusion I drawn after readings, trying demos, and my oen experience with installations of the major portal CMSs framwroks:

• TYPO3: No Arabization group, no experts within Arabeyes, hard to learn quickly.

• Mambo: No Arabization group, no experts within Arabeyes.

• Plone: Arabization group. 100% translated. [2]

• Drupal:
  • Strong, old, active Arabization group.
  • Experts within Arabyes: Amr Gharbeia, M. Sameer, others.
  • Experts within other Arabization communities:Eglug and others [3]

Drupal's version choice for Arabic pages

Alaa, one of the Drupal Arabization group commented on the Arabic translation files as: "just an automated merge of the old translation to help translators, don't even try to use this release." [4]

More on the subject:

• resource: [5]
• resource: [6]

Drupal's version choice and upgradability

Upgrade plan for Drupal 7 Please discuss it here first, then we can write the conclusion after discussion. [7]

Call for working on Drupal 7 Arabization now

As we see .. version 7 is coming, and version 6 Arabic files are not yet ready for use! I suggest working on Drupal 7 Arabization from now if possible, in order to have this language files ready on time of V. 7 release. This will help us too in our upgrading plan, so we don't face this same situation again.

Final Decision on Drupal's version

Drupal 5.9 Decided in meeting 10 Aug 2008 For technical and practical reasons.

Please mention justification --أحمد غربية 23:14، 10 أغسطس 2008 (UTC)

Justification is here, plus, almost no member expressed any objection to our decision last general meeting held on Sunday 10 August. I am sorry no one updated the discussion page, but that what exactly happened, almost all members, including Khaled Hosney, Mohammed Sameer, Ossama Khayat, Mohamed Magdy, Abderrahim Kitouni and others. Some had opinion against the version ( which is 5.9) (namely: Mohammed Sameer), but as he didn't provide any details or reasons to members or convinced them to recommend another version, we went with the latest 5.x version. Mfarag 21:46، 18 أغسطس 2008 (UTC)

Live examples

http://www.ideapack.net/arabeyes/

References

• [8]

Decision on design standards and selection:

Website Sections

• Press section.
• Contact, about.
• Donation section.
• Project page
  • URL alias, a name, about, logo, data, status ()
  • Coordinator and contributers (user reference CCK field), date, logo (Image field) and various other fields.
• Members list page
• Hall of fame section.
• Member personal profile page

Screen resolution support

Page layout theme selection/ making

I prefer to see and evaluate available themes, and customiz them if needed, before we make our own from scratch. This will save us a significant amount or work and time.

User authentication

OpenID: available in Drupal 6.0, add-on module in 5.x --أحمد غربية 23:12، 10 أغسطس 2008 (UTC).

Modules

Drupal provides core modules that comes with its installation files, and contributed modules that community members and groups have made it to be installed and activated later on.

I will list here all modules that are front-end (meaning: that almost all non-administrators can use and see), not the administration-specific core modules that work in the background.