<shameless plug> A couple years back I was working at Bug Labs and we relied heavily on the Openembedded project. We contributed source code patches as you would expect, but one unique contribution was having our designer make a new logo for Openembedded. You can see it on their website today. </shameless plug><p>This doesn't seem to occur to people very often, but if your company is relying on an open source project, source code patches are not the only way to contribute back.<p>Can you spare some time from your designer? Help out with a logo or website design work.<p>Do you have a doc writer? We all joke about RTFM, but if there is no manual that doesn't help much.<p>There are some things that developers don't necessarily <i>want</i> to do, so those areas often lack on open source projects based on volunteers. A company using their resources to fill in some of the gaps helps a lot.<p>I also don't understand why designers will compete on 99designs but don't seem to contribute to open source that often. If you are trying to break into the industry by showcasing your work, why prefer the 1 in 30 odds of having your design chosen in a crowd sourcing competition over actually helping out an existing project?
One thing that would really make the website work better is to make pages like <a href="http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html</a> hierarchical with an overview and one or two sub levels so each function gets its own page, making it easier to find via search (The Google) and do dynamic linking from IDE:s or whatever if the url routing were set up smart.<p>Today when you search for 'random.choice python' you get to the random front page with 20+ random functions forcing you to first click on the google search result (probably with a lower CTR than if you have had the function name in the title) and then when entering the docs page hit CTRL+F and do a page search for 'random.choice'. That would make my life easier, and annotated documentation, preferably with some kind of "like"-functionality pushing the good answers up. I do get however that some people like to have the full spec for all random functions in one page...
One other thing they should improve is the search function in the documentation:<p><a href="http://docs.python.org/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/</a><p>The first relevant result for searching "string concatenation" is around the 20th place.<p><a href="http://docs.python.org/search.html?q=string+concatenation" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/search.html?q=string+concatenation</a>
Best of luck with the redesign. I recently started learning Python and finally realize what I've been missing for so many years.<p>I'm not sure of the intended audience of python.org (new users vs. experienced), but as a brand new Python user, the current website is filled with lots of great information, but is a bit intimidating. I think the Python language really sells itself and it would be nice to see some simple examples on the homepage as is done on the NodeJS page (e.g. <a href="http://nodejs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nodejs.org/</a>).<p>Reading through some of the posts on Guido van Rossum's blog was also very inspiring ("Python in the Scientific World", "The depth and breadth of Python"). It's great to see a BDFL so actively involved. There are so many great stories about how Python is used successfully across in so many industries and among well-known brands. It would be great to see more of this on the main page.
I'm wondering if it's really a good idea to have such wildly differing requirements be fulfilled with one just proposal.<p>Let me elaborate: you're asking a potential bidder to be fluent in information architecture, <i>and</i> back-end development, <i>and</i> systems architecture, <i>and</i> design. Those four disciplines are so far apart that I would be very curious to see if you can select one company that does all of them equally well. And if you do happen to find one, it would be interesting to see if they really can deliver top-notch quality in all of them.<p>If you ask me, you'd be better of recruiting a separate design, possibly accompanied with an appropriate information architecture, and <i>then</i> start to think about how to do the back-end development and systems architecture.<p>Not only is this a separation of concerns (hooray!), I also think it will get you a bigger pool of applicants, they will also be more likely to be world class in their field. No-one is world class in <i>all</i> those fields at the same time, and trying to find one company that <i>is</i> will most likely get you an 'average' result in at least one area.
> <i>Content must be editable offline, when there is no network availability.</i><p>I'm curious to know why this is a requirement for python.org? I mean, edit contention is an area one has to deal with even if editing with a network connection, so there isn't an enormous technical burden associated with offline editing, but this does require more effort.
I don't mean to hijack the thread, but (a bit) relevant: <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/2Xy7SZAOc7E" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/2X...</a> "Redesign of djangoproject.com"<p>good luck for both, can't wait.
This is definitely a shameless plug, but I thought it might be worth mentioning here that my current side project is a MIT-licensed Python documentation API called "Python Docs," available at: <a href="http://github.com/mvanveen/docs" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/mvanveen/docs</a> .<p>The goal is to leverage static analysis as much as possible to provide an intuitive API for Python documentation primitives. So far I have used the project to power a code browsing interface that I recently started working on, but I think that others could find the project really useful.
Plone should do something for this, it sounds very well suited? Any plone people about? I guess moinmoin/trac too :) What about some Django or pyramid teams?<p>People from the PSF will probably also put in a proposal, since lots are web people. Which ones?<p>A top agency could probably charge at least $1 million for something like this. So I doubt there will be a top result... unless they do it pro bono. Which would let USA companies do it as a tax right off if I'm not mistaken? Maybe one of the sponsors will put in a bid: Facebook, Google, or Dropbox?<p>All very exciting.<p>Or perhaps some wunderkid-wizard-wonk will hack tirelessly on their keyboard+wacom - powered only by a will to provide pythonistas everywhere a great website. They will about face everything with a fresh open approach, that turns the ideas upside down and puts code and projects first, doing an edgy remix of pypi, that integrates an IDE console inside the website (or coming up with an actual good idea) that makes people think "why weren't all programming websites like this already?". They'll do all this before the submission period is even up, having gathered feedback and evolved their idea consulting tens of 1000s of pythonists, djangonaughts, and people from other communities. Time magazine will have a picture of them next to the new python.org with the headline in all caps... <i>"EPIC"</i>.
Looking at the requirements, particularly l10n and the REST API for editing (which rules out compilers, unless the API server operates at a different privilege level), this will have to be solved by something like a CMS. Except for the offline editing requirement, which makes something DVCS-backed necessary. Anyway, it will be a good showcase for whichever stack is chosen.
In something as complicated and as has as much information as a an open source project does, the need for a clean, organized, thoughtful interface plan/design is paramount. The quicker the information is to find and the more digestible it is, the quicker the project will be adopted and built upon... in theory of course!