Back in the beginning of 2010 the Mozilla community started to feel a lot less open to me. I could not put my finger at what it was, until half a year later someone pointed out that the notes from the various weekly meetings were no longer posted to Planet Mozilla.
These notes contain a lot of information about what moves in the Mozilla community. Having them on the wiki is all well, but being able to subscribe to them is essential to me to stay up to date on Mozilla matters. I remember the raise of hands at Mozilla Camp Europe 2009 in Prague where almost nobody attended the meetings, almost everybody used the meeting notes as a source of information about Mozilla, and roughly half considered the notes a primary source of Mozilla information.
Though I know the notes are important to me and I think they are important to a lot of others, this blog doesn’t do its best at sharing them.
Two of the problems with the current blog are:
- The layout is not great. The notes are a lot more pleasant to read directly on the wiki than on the blog. I don’t know why, as I am not a graphical designer, but I think the spacing between the list items and the sizing of the headers are a lot better on the wiki. There are many themes to choose from on blog.mozilla.org, but the meeting notes make heavy use of both nested headings and nested lists, and most themes on blog.mozilla.org fails to display at least one of these two. For example it is common for the themes to display the following two lists the same:
- one
- two
- three
and
- one
- two
- three
- two
The previous theme used by this blog before I took over had this problem, which severely reduced the readability of the notes. If someone has a hint for a better blog.mozilla.org theme to use, please tell.
- The wiki to WordPress converter script has some bugs. It includes a bunch of HTML code and MediaWiki navigation UI in the blog posts, as well as other wasteful information such as the meeting location and dail-in information. I do not have the time to correct these things myself, but anybody is welcome to help. The converter script is open source and ready for anybody to hack.
If you know of any other problems with this blog, please tell, and if you are interested in helping fix the problems I have described, please tell. I can be reached at: mail at jesperkristensen.dk.
I don’t have time currently to dig into the MediaWiki-to-WordPress posting script, but for similar purpose I’ve programmed a script few years ago that takes snippets from a specific wiki page and process them into HTML. I’ve used the print-preview page of MediaWiki which I thought is more future-proof than the regular view. The script was never licensed as opensource, but I am willing to hand it over in case you think it could help (it is a PHP script we are running as a daily cronjob on our local Mozilla community site for few years already).
As for the theme, I’d suggest asking someone to grab the custom styles of the wiki content and pasting it as a WordPress theme. I think it should be best if we could make WordPress to look the same as the original MediaWiki pages.
– Tomer.
Comment by Tomer Cohen — 24-September-2011 @ 8:44 pm
Thank you for your offer. But I don’t think another script which is not made for the meeting notes will bring us closer to a better script, it would probably require adaptation just like the current script, which is what I do not have time for right now.
If we could get the theme from the wiki as a WordPress theme on blog.mozilla.org, that would be great, yes. If you are interested in making that happen, I welcome you to do so.
Comment by Jesper Kristensen — 25-September-2011 @ 5:33 pm