Hello,

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

One of the things discussed at LGM was moving all project's domain and subdomains to a single dedicated server. We have a person willing to do the migration and a person to create a new website.

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Michael Schumacher wrote:

We're currently unable to update the website (if you have a look at the index page, even the release announcements aren't up to date).

Until this is resolved, we won't be able to add, edit or remove anything to, on or from www.gimp.org.

After reading this, I have to ask: what?! I was indeed wondering why the website isn't being updated at all (release new unstable gimp builds, or at least give some note that this project is alive).
I think that we can learn a bit from the inkscape website about this - they update the main page even when it's not to announce about the release of some XXX stuff. They update the website to inform about confrences (LGM, SVG Open), about the current status of the project (we completed XXX, and XXX bugs remain to the next version), and about major events like Google summer of code (We haven't even announced on the main website that we are looking for students!).

At least to me, this seems a bit urgent. A project which is being developed is not going to be used without a way to contact the "outside" world (in our case, a website). Some of my collegues laugh at the fact that I try to contribute to GIMP, and say that it's a waste of time. I do believe that if the project wouldn't have looked "dead", to people from the outside, for 8 months (this is the period since the last website update), people would estimate the project more.
I think that one of the things that can help to make GIMP look better for the users, is to make them see that something is indeed moving, and it's undoubtfully should be somewhere on the top TODOs. As developers, we may live very well without these updates to the main website, since we work on the projects not because someone is telling us, but for ourselves. But, we mustn't forget the open-source is also for the community, and so we should consider the community in our decisions and TODOs.

For those of you who know the Blender project, and the BlenderNation website, I do believe that we need some sort of blog/new site which are connected one to the other. BlenderNation is a community based site which updates regularly from the developer meetings/notes, and the offical blender website also shows headlines from blendernation. The closest thing that I found for GIMP, is http://meetthegimp.org/ which looks pretty good (although I haven't been visiting this site before, so I can't tell for sure). They do seem to update about developments and they seem like the most constantly updated website.

Seriously, updating the website should be somewhere at the top of the TODO list (not the most important, but definetly important). Alexandre Prokoudine mentioned something about someone who wants to update the website, and we also received some suggestion to the mailing list a few weeks ago. I also am willing to contribute content to the new website when it'll be set up (my web-development skills do need more polish before I can actually contribute to build a new webste).

LightningIsMyName