[Biopython-dev] Work on an updated biopython.org website

[Brad Chapman]

Hey all;
As some of you may know, one of the things we tried to do at the
hackathon in Sinapore was to do some simplification of the Bio*
websites so that they are easier to keep updated. One aspect of this was
introducing a shared news site where it is easy to post news for
different projects (http://news.open-bio.org).

With website redesign in mind, I volunteered to do some work on getting
a new biopython.org site up and running (yes, I was out of my mind
during volunteering). I have been working on this over the past couple
of weeks and have a prototype website up at:

http://evostick.agtec.uga.edu/biopython/

(be nice to this, it's just my work computer, okay). So far I've done
the main index page and the download page, just to give people something
to look at and give feedback on.

The page is implemented using Quixote:

http://www.mems-exchange.org/software/quixote/

This is a very nice (in my opinion, of course) framework for making web
pages. The advantage of it are that the pages are basically made up of
python code returning HTML, so I think the page makeup and everything is
very easy to understand. This also allowed me to do stuff like talk to
the news.open-bio.org page by XML-RPC, and theoretically could let us do
more dynamic pages in the future.

To get an idea of what the current pages look like, you can download the
website in it's current form from:

http://www.biopython.org/~chapmanb/BioWebsite-0.1.tar.gz

In my mind, this can make the site a little easier to update and
maintain and might ease some of the annoying HTML-typing you have to do
right now.

I'd love to get feedback on this from people to see what they think
about what I've got.

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend. Time for me to enjoy the warm
Georgia weather.
Brad