This policy was decided by the responsible for IT systems of FFII on November 2006.
FFII policy for web sites of local sections
Centrally, in FFII we only care for our international web sites, such as www.ffii.org or press.ffii.org, which are all in English. We make no translations in other languages, and we don't tell you how to setup the web site of your local section. You obviously only need to respect the purpose etc. of the organisation since you are using its name, but this is the rule everywhere, not only on web sites.
So we won't tell you what machine to put your web server on, or what software to use, or what content to put on the web site of your local section. It's all up to you.
However, we can provide you with some infrastructure, if you so want it. Most new FFII web sites use the moinmoin wiki, and if you want, we can easily create a wiki for you, where you will be putting content. If you want this, ask at [ffii:listinfo:polis-parl polis-parl]. We can also give you a name of the form xx.ffii.org, where xx is your country, or your language, or some other specifier of your local group (but you may also use www.ffii.xx, if you own it and make it point to our web server). That's all we can do for you. We will probably refuse to install any other software you need, such as another content management system, on FFII servers, as we don't have the resources to deal with that. If you want that, you need to find another server.
Language vs. country in xx.ffii.org
Should xx designate your language or your country? Again, it's up to you. This is a question only for cases when language and country are tightly related, for example Greece and Sweden. We'll give you whatever you choose. However, the country seems the most obvious choice, because xx.ffii.org will not be a version of www.ffii.org in an alternative language; it will be the web site of your local group, so unless your local group is "the worldwide lojban association" or something, you are probably country-based, not language-based.
Moinmoin decisions you need to make
The page name (in the URL) is the page title, unless you override that with the "#pragma title" directive (note: "#pragma heading" is an old, deprecated synonym of "#pragma title"). You should decide on a policy on whether to use title-like URLs, such as http://whatever.ffii.org/Why_software_patents_are_bad, or simple URLs such as http://whatever.ffii.org/articles/swpat/bad, and use "#pragma title" to be overriding their titles. In the central FFII sites, we started with the first way, because it has one advantage: you don't get much Lojban or other cryptic URLs, and you don't have to train your editors or have them disagree on the URL scheme, because the decision is very simple.
However, we changed the policy and now we support using the "#pragma title" directive, because it has more advantages:
- The URL, which is an identifier, is not overloaded with content. This means that you can change the title without changing the URL.
- URLs are simpler, shorter, and easier to remember and type in.
You can keep URLs in ascii characters, although your title may have nonascii ones. Try http://pl.wikipedia.org/ and see how ugly is the URL. Try http://el.wikipedia.org/ for a worse example.
Note that "#pragma title" not a standard moin feature; it is a custom addition in the themes used by FFII. Many Moin authors use heading 1 for the title and heading 2 for sections, but this is by no means universal, whereas it has the additional disadvantage that the "title" html element gets the page name (the URL), which is useless. "#pragma title" will change both the title visible on the page and the "title" html element.
So our recommendations are: don't use CamelCase URLs, use simple URLs, and use "#pragma title". The actual decisions, as explained above, are entirely yours to make.
You also need to decide what will be the URL of the copyright page and tell us before we create your web site. Maybe you simply want "copyright" or "web_copyright" (you might want "copyright" for a section with your/FFII's views on copyright or so).
Of course, you'll have to fill the copyright page with content, so you must also decide on a license for your web content.
First things you need to fix
After we give you your new web site, the first things you need to do are:
- Create the navigation_menu page (use an existing one from our web sites as an example).
- Create the copyright page.
To do
This document is missing instructions about access control. To be written.
Note: Ask your questions at [ffii:listinfo:polis-parl polis-parl], and please improve this document when you get your answers. But try to keep it short and don't be afraid to delete when former editors have been blabbing too much. Remember that people won't read it if it's long.
