After spending 36 hours between planes and airports, I had the pleasure to participate GUADEC this year, that happened a couple of days ago in The Hague (luckily I arrived 2 days before the conference to recover myself of jet lag).

This time GUADEC was located in Den Haag University, and we had a big area for hacking and discussing ideas for GNOME.

Before the talks and keynotes, during the first two days of the conference, I discussed with a lot of people about the state of the gnome.org website. Since the current implementation in Plone was lacking hands to get it done (the start of this work dates from 2007 or so), I suggested instead to do a new approach other than try to keep working in the plone code.

Right on the lobby tables I started then to port the website templates done by me and Andreas to WordPress. Of course you may think that start from scratch the work of a website in another CMS can take even more time, but the difference is that WordPress is widely known and more maintainable (and easier, of course!).

So, basically, to say how WordPress rocks, I got done all the implementation of GNOME website in a couple of days during the conference itself. This means we now have support for static pages, custom template for footers, full localization (by using this great WPML plugin), dynamic banners for the home page and news.

The only possible problem by using WP is that by now it is not possible to integrate it with the infrastructure that GNOME have for translations. Still, if we look the system as a whole, this won’t be a problem since the translation system in WPML works great.

We’re right now putting all the content already made in the wordpress pages. Next step includes polishing the existing content and making it fun to read (other than using long boring paragraphs of text). Oh, and we need to migrate old content as well.

The cool part about all of this is that WP is simple to hack and easy to add new functionalities. A long waited feature we planned to put on the new website is the products page, which will contain a list of featured applications around the GNOME platform with some description. Together with Daniel, we defined a initial set of what to show in these pages. We still need to work on this a bit, but it’s great to see things getting done!

As Ruben said, GUADEC really consisted of truckloads of awesomeness. I must say a big thank you again to the GNOME Foundation (which needs a new website by the way:P) for letting me get there again this year.