mgage
commented
4 years ago We tried Drupal. ( go to https://openwebwork.org) to see the site. Djun Kim set it up ( he is an expert) but then no-one stepped up to do the back-end maintenance and the front page got hacked. (There is still useful info on that site -- in particular the bibliography -- which I have downloaded and saved off line. )
I found Hugo to not be too bad -- it took me a full day to get the templates set up, even using an example, and even now I'd like to return and make some changes. Posting items within the template structure is quite easy -- and you can use markdown which makes it quicker. Once the templates are set up it is straightforward dealing with HTML or markup files.
The fact that you have to grab a copy of the site from github (https://github.com/mgage/demo-home-site), make changes and then issue a pull request to post the changes is a little time consuming but dealing with github should I hope become a common skill among webwork users as we start trying to maintain versions of everything. The version on webwork.maa.org has not been updated in 8 years -- so it's not like we make changes frequently :-)
If we go with Hugo I would move the current repository on my site to github.com/openwebwork and set up an automatic rendering so if a pull request is approved the changes appear on the website. I think we could serve the website from github as well, so it's not tied to a U of R server.
dlglin
taniwallach
Currently the front page of webwork.maa.org is static html, which means editing the source to make any changes. We should move to some sort of Content Management System to make maintenance easier. Hugo @mgage has set up a sample site using Hugo at https://demo.webwork.rochester.edu/public/. The benefit of something like Hugo is that the entire website code can be stored on GitHub. The downside is that there is a significant learning curve to using Hugo, which could easily discourage people from joining the web maintenance team. Traditional CMS I'd like to look at using a traditional CMS like Drupal or Wordpress. The largest benefit is the ease of editing the site using the web tools. This would make it much easier to bring new collaborators on board without requiring technical skills. The biggest downside I see is the back-end maintenance. It is yet another service that would need to be maintained and updated.