Re: moving LilyPond blog to our website

[Paul Morris]

Janek wrote:
>  1) are we going to use WordPress or something else, for example Mezzaine:

I have no experience with Mezzanine, but I found this helpful comparison with 
WordPress from a Mezzanine users forum:
http://grokbase.com/t/gg/mezzanine-users/12byf39adw/wordpress-vs-mezzanine

It sounds like Mezzanine is great if you have a Python/Django developer who can 
administer it and especially if you want to do more than blogging with your 
site (i.e. web applications).  On the other hand, WordPress requires less 
developer effort, has fewer dependencies, and works well if you just want to do 
a blog site (i.e. _not_ web applications).


>  (another option could probably be blog.lilypond.org, but i have no
>  idea whether that's a purely cosmetical choice or has some
>  implications.)

One consequence here is that subdomains like "blog.lilypond.org" are treated as 
separate sites by search engines, and so they are ranked separately.  So this 
splits your site content into two sites, rather than putting it all under one 
site.  I think the latter is generally better from a 
"doing-well-in-search-results" (SEO) perspective.  


>  As for the integration, i think that the blog should be accessible as
>  an item in the top menubar (I.e. next to Introduction, Manuals,
>  Download and Community).


Another possibility is to have it as a sublink/subheading under "Community" and 
maybe also have a link from the home page where "Pondings" is.  Maybe as Urs 
mentioned have a few recent posts listed there (possibly from a particular 
category?).  This would be a more conservative approach.  Depending on how 
things go, later a link to the blog could move up into the top-level navigation 
menu (while keeping the URLs the same).  

Going the other direction, you could have the top level navigation/menubar 
appear on all the blog pages, making it easy to get from the blog back to the 
rest of the site.  This just requires tweaking your WordPress theme (using a 
"child theme" of the twentytwelve theme you're now using).  That's something 
I've done and could help with.  (I'm less help with installing PHP and the 
MySQL database, but I'm pretty handy customizing a WordPress site once it's up 
and running.)

Urs Liska wrote:
> The fundamental question is whether to host the blog on a 'live' (i.e. php 
> based) system or with a static site generator. What are the capabilities on 
> the lilypond.org server (wrt installed programs and performance)?  

This is a good question.  For a blog where people can post comments and then 
immediately see them appear, that means dynamic rather than static.  However, 
there are caching plugins for WordPress[1] that help with this by automatically 
storing a static html copy of each page and then just sending that to the web 
browser[2].  When a new post or comment is made, the changed pages are removed 
from the cache and the new version of those pages gets stored again. 

[1] I've used HyperCache: 
http://wordpress.org/plugins/hyper-cache/  
http://www.satollo.net/plugins/hyper-cache

[2] How it works, from one of the links above:
"On each request, the cache engine is called by WordPress. It checks if the 
html for this request is in cache and is still valid. If so the html page is 
returned and everything stops. WordPress calls the cache engine BEFORE any 
other kind of operations, so no plugins are activated, no database connection 
established, no queries executed. If the page requested is not in cache, the 
cache engine “captures” the html produced by WordPress and puts it on file."


Phil Holmes wrote:
> However, I honestly don't think it's a case of just asking someone and admin 
> being given. As others have said, what about the load on the server? Will 
> there be any other effect. I'd suggest trying to involve GP before assuming 
> this will automatically happen.

I think this is a good idea.

-Paul Morris